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

Print a list of all hardlinks in the working directory, recursively
libpurple likes to hardlink files repeatedly. To ignore libpurple, use sed: | sed '/\.\/\.purple/d'

Delete the specified line

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
More recent versions of the date command finally have the ability to decode the unix epoch time into a human readable date. This function makes it simple to utilize this feature quickly.

Backup files incremental with rsync to a NTFS-Partition
This will backup the _contents_ of /media/SOURCE to /media/TARGET where TARGET is formatted with ntfs. The --modify-window lets rsync ignore the less accurate timestamps of NTFS.

generate iso

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Stream audio over ssh
This will allow you to convert an audio file to wav format, and send it via ssh to a player on the other computer, which will open and play it there. Of course, substitute your information for the sound file and remote address You do not have to use paplay on the remote end, as it is a PulseAudio thing. If the remote end uses ALSA, you should use aplay instead. If it uses OSS, you should berate them about having a lousy sound system. Also, you're not limited to transmitting encoded as wav either, it's just that AFAIK, most systems don't come with mp3 codecs, but will play wav files fine. If you know SoX is installed on the remote end and has mp3 codecs, you can use the following instead: $ cat Klaxon.mp3 |ssh thelab@company.com play -t mp3 - this will transmit as mp3. Again, use your specific information. if you're not playing mp3s, use another type with the -t option

Erase empty files
The command find search commands with size zero and erase them.

the same as [Esc] in vim
Faster and more convinent than [Esc]

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)


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: