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

Define words and phrases with google.
This version works on Mac (avoids grep -P, adding a sed step instead, and invokes /usr/bin/perl with full path in case you have another one installed). Still requires that you install perl module HTML::Entities ? here's how: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=640489

Check syntax of all Perl modules or scripts underneath the current directory
Finds all *.p[ml]-files and runs a perl -c on them, checking whether Perl thinks they are syntactically correct

Using a single sudo to run multiple && arguments
Bash's here string

list files recursively by size

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Convert diff output to HTML ins/del

do something else while waiting for an event, such as reboot
until (ssh root@10.1.1.39 2> /dev/null); do date; sleep 15; done In this case will execute "date" then "sleep 15" until we are able to ssh into server, such as after a reboot Could also be like: until ( ping 10.1.1.39 1> /dev/null); do echo "server 10.1.1.39 is down"; sleep 15; done

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

Database size
Mysql command to list the disk usage of the database

Lock the hardware eject button of the cdrom
This command will lock the hardware eject button of your cdrom drive. Some uses are: 1: If you have a toddler and has discovered the cdrom button 2: If you are carrying a laptop in a bag or case and don't want it to eject if the button is inadvertently pressed. To unlock the button use: $ eject -i 0


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: