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

Expand shortened URLs
curl(1) is more portable than wget(1) across Unices, so here is an alternative doing the same thing with greater portability. This shell function uses curl(1) to show what site a shortened URL is pointing to, even if there are many nested shortened URLs. This is a great way to test whether or not the shortened URL is sending you to a malicious site, or somewhere nasty that you don't want to visit. The sample output is from: $ expandurl http://t.co/LDWqmtDM

Determine whether a CPU has 64 bit capability or not

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

copy string to clipboard
Copy the current path. Use -selection clipboard to copy the string to clipboard.

Find UTF-8 text files misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1 due to Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard.
Character: "?" is the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard. Specifically it is the hex bytes EF BB BF, which form the UTF-8 representation of the BOM, misinterpreted as ISO 8859/1 text instead of UTF-8.

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

relabel current konsole tab
usage: renam in a script you must replace $PPID with $(awk '{print $4}' /prod/$PPID/stat)

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Find non-standard files in mysql data directory
These files should be removed to keep the size of data directory under control. If you exclude the known important file types like frm and MYD then what-ever is left can be either moved or deleted.

Print a cron formatted time for 2 minutes in the future (for crontab testing)
Another function to stick into your .bashrc This spits out the time two minutes in the future, but already formatted for pasting into your crontab file for testing without any thought required on your part. Frequently things don't work the way you expect inside a crontab job, and you probably want to find out now that your $PATH is completely different inside of cron or other global variables aren't defined. So this will generate a date you can use for testing now, and then later you can change it to run at 5:37 am on a Sunday evening.


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: