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.

Sort the size usage of a directory tree by gigabytes, kilobytes, megabytes, then bytes.
Probably only works with GNU du and modern perls.

Set access and modification timestamps of a file using another one as reference
atime and mtime timestamps of $FILE2 is changed according to the ones of $FILE1. If $FILE2 doesn't exist is created.

In-Place search/replace with datestamped backup
Does an in situ search-replace but leaves a datestamped backup. A variation with more precision: sed -i.`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S 's/pattern/replace' [filename]

remap Caps_Lock to Escape

Re-use the previous command output
The $(!!) will expand to the previous command output (by re-running the command), which becomes the parameter of the new command newcommand.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

A one-line web server in Ruby
Here's how to serve a directory in one line of Ruby. Handy for sharing files at a conference, for example.

clear current line

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


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: