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

Graphical tree of sub-directories
Prints a graphical directory tree from your current directory

Change the From: address on the fly for email sent from the command-line
It's very common to have cron jobs that send emails as their output, but the From: address is whatever account the cron job is running under, which is often not the address you want replies to go to. Here's a way to change the From: address right on the command line. What's happening here is that the "--" separates the options to the mail client from options for the sendmail backend. So the -f and -F get passed through to sendmail and interpreted there. This works on even on a system where postfix is the active mailer - looks like postfix supports the same options. I think it's possible to customize the From: address using mutt as a command line mailer also, but most servers don't have mutt preinstalled.

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

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

resume scp-filetransfer with rsync
resume a partial scp-filetransfer with rsync

What is my ip?

Find the location of the currently loaded php.ini file
Quick and easy way to find out which php.ini file is being used. Especially useful if you just need to find the location of the file for editing purposes.

Mount the first NTFS partition inside a VDI file (VirtualBox Disk Image)
Found at: http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=52

Add a line from 1 file after every line of another (shuffle files together)
After every line in targetfile (empty lines included) insert in a line from addfile. "Save" results to savefile. Addfile should be longer than targetfile since this doesn't loop back to the top of addfile. /^/R addfile -- says for every line that matches "has a start of line" output a line from the file addfile. > savefile (optional) -- redirect output to savefile file.


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: