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 files with the same names in several directories.
cat file1 file2 file3|sort|uniq -d finds the same lines in several files, especially in files with lists of files.

Download all PDFs from an authenificated website
Replace *** with the appropiate values

See system users

Count opening and closing braces in a string.
This function counts the opening and closing braces in a string. This is useful if you have eg long boolean expressions with many braces and you simply want to check if you didn't forget to close one.

let a cow tell you your fortune

Tells which group you DON'T belong to (opposite of command "groups") --- uses sed
special thanks to XwZ :)

Display a list of committers sorted by the frequency of commits
Use this command to find out a list of committers sorted by the frequency of commits.

Replace underscores with spaces in filenames and dirnames, recursively into subdirs.
Everyone wants to take spaces out of filenames. Forget that. I want to put them back in. We've got tools and filesystems that support spaces, they look better, so I'm going to use them. Because of how find works I find I need to run this multiple times, if it's renaming subdirs. But it can be re-run without issues. I got this version of the command from a comment in this underscore-generating command. http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/760/find-recursively-from-current-directory-down-files-and-directories-whose-names-contain-single-or-multiple-whitespaces-and-replace-each-such-occurrence-with-a-single-underscore. All I did was change the regex.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Release memory used by the Linux kernel on caches
The Linux kernel uses unused memory in caches. When you execute "free" you never get the "real" available memory.


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: