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

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

backup a directory in a timestamped tar.gz
creates a tar.gz with a name like: backup20090410_173053.tar.gz of a given directory. this file was made 10 April 2009 at 5:30:53pm see date's man page to customize the timestamp format

Search for a string inside all files in the current directory
shorter typing with no need to use xargs.

floating point operations in shell scripts
-l auto-selects many more digits (but you can round/truncate in your head, right) plus it loads a few math functions like sin().

Batch File Rename with awk and sed

Find the package that installed a command

Broadcast your shell thru port 5000
Doesn't work so well if you connect from windows. Linux only sends LF where windows wants CRLF. The alternative command works better with windows, however it uses script and a named pipe.

View files opened by a program on startup and shutdown
Run this before you run a command in order to see what the command does as it starts. The -c flag is useful here as the PID is unknown before startup. All config files, libraries, logs, ports, etc used by the command as it starts up, (and shuts down) will be captured at 1s intervals and written to a file. Useful for debugging etc.

execute your commands and avoid history records
$ secret_command;export HISTCONTROL= This will make "secret_command" not appear in "history" list.

list with full path


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: