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

Binary digits Matrix effect
Silly Perl variant.

Install a basic FreeBSD system
Install a basic FreeBSD system on a distant server. I use this to install FreeBSD on servers that can only boot a Linux rescue system. This sytem loads on ram when booted, so it is possible to install freely. You can even install on ZFS root !

DELETE all those duplicate files but one based on md5 hash comparision in the current directory tree
This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories). Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd. md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems. The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used. Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept. It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00. As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead: $ find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | perl -ne 'chomp; $ph=$h; ($h,$f)=split(/\s+/,$_,2); if ($h ne $ph) { $k = $f; } else { unlink($f); link($k, $f); }'

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Bulk renames with find, sed and a little escaping
This command is a more flexible than my previous submission. It will work with spaces however suuuuper hacky and ugly. Source: http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/146173-find-rename-files-using-find-mv-sed.html

find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir

git diff of files that have been staged ie 'git add'ed

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).

My random music player
This is my favorite music player I use in my beloved Linux systems,server or desktop Enjoy :-)

extract all urls from firefox sessionstore
This will extract all of the urls from a firefox session (including urls in a tab's history). The sessionstore.js file is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{firefox profile}


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: