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

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

backup directory. (for bash)

Start a quick rsync daemon for fast copying on internal secure network
"Sample output" shows a minimalistic configuration file.

online MAC address lookup

tail a log over ssh
This is also handy for taking a look at resource usage of a remote box. $ ssh -t remotebox top

List all symbolic links in current directory that matches regexp
Perl alternative to list symlinks with a clumsy regexp filter: place the regex instead of he example 'libxml' and end it with a wildchar to see the results (previous cd on dir). Is it possible change the '-l' test for '-d' and it will search for directories. [Same applies for -x and -X. See $(perldoc -f -x) for more tests]. I use it quite often when dealing with shared libraries...

Add line number count as C-style comments
I often find the need to number enumerations and other lists when programming. With this command, create a new file called 'inputfile' with the text you want to number. Paste the contents of 'outputfile' back into your source file and fix the tabbing if necessary. You can also change this to output hex numbering by changing the "%02d" to "%02x". If you need to start at 0 replace "NR" with "NR-1". I adapted this from http://osxdaily.com/2010/05/20/easily-add-line-numbers-to-a-text-file/.

Access to specific man page section
You can view the man pages from section five by passing the section number as an argument to the man command

Rename files in batch


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: