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

Create a file of a given size in linux
if the fs support sparse file,using truncate can create sparse file. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Monitor all DNS queries made by Firefox

Set name of windows in tmux/byobu to hostnames of servers you're connected to
*I run this with byobu as as a custom status bar entry that runs every 10 seconds by putting it in a script here: $ .byobu/bin/10_update_windows There's no output to stdout, so nothing is displayed on the status bar. *Presumes that #{pane_title} is set to the hostname or prompt containing the host name. In my case, it's in this format: $ $USER@$HOSTNAME:$PWD The sed commands may need to be modified if your pane_title is different. *If you want to strip out a common part of a hostname, add the following before '| uniq' $ -e 's/[COMMON PART]//' I use that to strip out the domain of the servers I connect to, leaving the subdomain.

Inserts the results of an autocompletion in the command line
Pressing ESC then * will insert in the command line the results of the autocompletion. It's hard to explain but if you look the sample output or do $ echo ESC * you will understand quickly. By the way, few reminders about ESC : - Hold ESC does the same thing as tab tab - 'ESC .' inserts the last argument of last command (can be done many times in order to get the last argument of all previous commands)

Extract title from HTML files
previous version leaves lots of blank lines

Remind yourself to leave in 15 minutes
If you spend most of your time in front of the terminal, leave is a useful reminder. Leave can have absolute form: leave 1555 reminds you to leave at 3:55PM

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

Find broken symlinks and delete them
recursively deletes all broken symlinks using zsh globbing syntax.

Mount directories in different locations
Like symlinked directories, you can mount a directory at a different location. For example mounting a directory from one location in to the http root without having to make your program follow symlinks or change permissions when reading.


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: