All commands (14,187)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Fastest segmented parallel sync of a remote directory over ssh
Mirror a remote directory using some tricks to maximize network speed. lftp:: coolest file transfer tool ever -u: username and password (pwd is merely a placeholder if you have ~/.ssh/id_rsa) -e: execute internal lftp commands set sftp:connect-program: use some specific command instead of plain ssh ssh:: -a -x -T: disable useless things -c arcfour: use the most efficient cipher specification -o Compression=no: disable compression to save CPU mirror: copy remote dir subtree to local dir -v: be verbose (cool progress bar and speed meter, one for each file in parallel) -c: continue interrupted file transfers if possible --loop: repeat mirror until no differences found --use-pget-n=3: transfer each file with 3 independent parallel TCP connections -P 2: transfer 2 files in parallel (totalling 6 TCP connections) sftp://remotehost:22: use sftp protocol on port 22 (you can give any other port if appropriate) You can play with values for --use-pget-n and/or -P to achieve maximum speed depending on the particular network. If the files are compressible removing "-o Compression=n" can be beneficial. Better create an alias for the command.

get the top 10 longest filenames

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Stream (almost) any music track in mplayer
Just give it an artist and/or song at the end of the command as shown.

sort lines by length
making it "sound" more "natural" language like -- additionally sorting the longest words alphabetically: this approach is using: * to get at all lines of input * post-"for" structure * short-circuit-or in sort: if the lengths are the same, then sort alphabetically otherwise don't even evaluate the right hand side of the or * -C sets all input and ouput channels to utf8

cpu info

Show a notify popup in Gnome that expires in specified time and does not leave an icon in notifications tray
Tested in Gnome 3.4

100% rollback files to a specific revision

A function to output a man page as a pdf file
Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with "gnome-open file.pdf", or your favorite pdf viewer.


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: