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

Access folder "-"
If you try to access cd - you go to the last folder you were in.

Read almost everything (Changelog.gz, .tgz, .deb, .png, .pdf, etc, etc....)
It allows customizing by means of lesspipe. You need to write a ~/.lessfilter script and put this into your ~/.bashrc: eval $(lesspipe) export LESS=-r

Connect to TCP port 5000, transfer data and close connexion.
With no '-q 0' switch, nc simply waits, and whatever awaits the data hangs.

Get all links of a website

Grep colorized
Highlights the search pattern in red.

Show URL/text in clipboard as QR code
Copy a URL (or Thai text, or whatever) and hit the keyboard shortcut for this fu to display it as a QR code. It's an "air gapped" way to send stuff to your phone [unlike google chart API etc.] as long as you watch out for cameras ;). dependencies [sudo apt-get install]: qrencode xclip xloadimage

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

Find the package that installed a command

a short counter
Maybe you know shorter ?

count the number of specific characters in a file or text stream
In this example, the command will recursively find files (-type f) under /some/path, where the path ends in .mp3, case insensitive (-iregex). It will then output a single line of output (-print0), with results terminated by a the null character (octal 000). Suitable for piping to xargs -0. This type of output avoids issues with garbage in paths, like unclosed quotes. The tr command then strips away everything but the null chars, finally piping to wc -c, to get a character count. I have found this very useful, to verify one is getting the right number of before you actually process the results through xargs or similar. Yes, one can issue the find without the -print0 and use wc -l, however if you want to be 1000% sure your find command is giving you the expected number of results, this is a simple way to check. The approach can be made in to a function and then included in .bashrc or similar. e.g. $ count_chars() { tr -d -c "$1" | wc -c; } In this form it provides a versatile character counter of text streams :)


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: