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

format txt as table

List files with full path

move contents of the current directory to the parent directory, then remove current directory.
Robust means of moving all files up by a directory. Will handle dot files, filenames containing spaces, and filenames with almost any printable characters. Will not handle filenames containing a single-quote (but if you are moving those, it's time to go yell at whoever created them in the first place).

Switch to the previous branch used in git(1)
Very useful if you keep switching between the same two branches all the time.

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"

search for text in files. recursive.
recursively search dir for a a particular file type, search each file for a particular text.

Re-use the previous command output
The $(!!) will expand to the previous command output (by re-running the command), which becomes the parameter of the new command newcommand.

Scan for nearby Bluetooth devices.
Scans local area for visible Bluetooth devices. Use 'hcitool inq' to discover the type of device it is. And use -i hciX option to specify the local Bluetooth device to use.

Mirror a directory structure from websites with an Apache-generated file indexes
wget/curl/friends are not good with mirroring files off websites, especially those with Apache-generated directory listings. These tools endlessly waste time downloading useless index HTML pages. lftp's mirror command does a better job without the mess.

check site ssl certificate dates
remotely connects to an https site, fetches the ssl certificate and displays the valid dates for the cert


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: