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

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

sed /pat/!d without using sed (no RE; limited to shell patterns aka globbing)
POSIX requires this "string truncating" functionality. might as well use it, at least for very small tasks where invoking sed and using RE is overkill.

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.
Enhanced version: fixes sorting by human readable numbers, and filters out non MB or GB entries that have a G or an M in their name.

Display which distro is installed
Works on nearly all linux distros

Find a file's package or list a package's contents.
This is the fastest method to search the Debian package database. Requires the dlocate package. The dlocate db updates periodically, but you may force an update with # dlocate-update

Get playlist for Livestream on YouTube

List your largest installed packages.
Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the $ | sort -rn which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;)

List your largest installed packages.
Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the $ | sort -rn which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;)

Find the dates your debian/ubuntu packages were installed.
Find when debian packages were installed on a system.

prints line numbers


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: