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

escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

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.

ignore .DS_Store forever in GIT
With a couple of little commands, you?ll be able to ignore the .DS_Store files forever from your git repositories on mac! The following command will add the .gitignore file to the git configuration git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore then, the following, will add the .DS_Store to the list echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore

Numbers guessing game
Felt like I need to win the lottery, and wrote this command so I train and develop my guessing abilities.

Prepend a text to a file.
Prepend text to a file. It doen't need temporary files, ed or sed.

Run a command for blocks of output of another command
The given example collects output of the tail command: Whenever a line is emitted, further lines are collected, until no more output comes for one second. This group of lines is then sent as notification to the user. You can test the example with $ logger "First group"; sleep 1; logger "Second"; logger "group"

Download and extract a *tar.gz file with curl.

To Stop or Start (Restart) a Windows service from a Linux machine

Rename .JPG to .jpg recursively
This command is useful for renaming a clipart, pic gallery or your photo collection. It will only change the big caps to small ones (on the extension).

Convert IP octets to HEX with no dots.
Converts IP octets to hex using printf command. Useful for generating pxeboot aliases in the pxelinux.cfg folder.


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: