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

Find the package a command belongs to on debian-based distros
Advanced revision to the command 8776 . This revision follows symbolic links. The quotation-marks surrounding $(which $1) allows for graceful handling of errors ( ie. readlink does not complain incase 'which' command generates (null) output)

Countdown Clock
The biggest advantage over atoponce's nifty original is not killing the scrollback. Written assuming bash, but shouldn't be terribly difficult to port to other shells. S should be multiple spaces, but I can't get commandlinefu to save/show them properly, any help?

Get info about a GitHub user
In this example 'git' is the user name and the output format is YAML but you can change this to XML or JSON, eg: curl http://github.com/api/v1/json/usernamehere

List only directories, one per line
Alternatively, $ ls -F | grep /\$ but will break on directories containing newlines. Or the safe, POSIX sh way (but will miss dotfiles): $ for i in *; do test -d "./$i" && printf "%s\n" "$i"; done

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Create the directoty recursively

Sort movies by length, longest first
handles file names with spaces and colons, fixes sort (numeric!), uses mplayer, same output format as other alternatives

Visit wikileaks.com
Who needs a DNS server

Kills a process that is locking a file.
Useful when you're trying to unmount a volume and other sticky situations where a rogue process is annoying the hell out of you.

Print a horizontal line
Replace the underscore with any other character. e.g. + or - or =


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: