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

the same as [Esc] in vim
Faster and more convinent than [Esc]

Download a file and uncompress it while it downloads
This will uncompress the file while it's being downloaded which makes it much faster

a trash function for bash
Every rm'ed a file you needed? Of course you haven't. But I have. I got sick of it so I created a bash function. Here it is. It'll put trashed files into a $HOME/.Trash/"date" folder according to the date. I have rm aliased to it as well in my bashrc so that I still use the rm command. It'll choke if you attempt to trash a directory if that directory name is already in the Trash. This rarely happens in my case but it's easy enough to add another test and to mv the old dir if necessary. function trash(){ if [ -z "$*" ] ; then echo "Usage: trash filename" else DATE=$( date +%F ) [ -d "${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE}" ] || mkdir -p ${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE} for FILE in $@ ; do mv "${FILE}" "${HOME}/.Trash/${DATE}" echo "${FILE} trashed!" done fi }

Move all files between to date
In a folder with many files and folders, you want to move all files where the date is >= the file olderFilesNameToMove and

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Download free e-books
Mask the user agent as firefox, recursively download 2 levels deep from a span host with a maximum of 1 redirection, use random wait time and dump all pdf files to myBooksFolder without creating any other directories. Host will have no way of knowing that this is a grabber script.

connects to a serial console
e.g., 'screen -L /dev/ttyUSB0 38400' listens to your Holux M-241 GPS logger and turns on automatic logging

Unaccent an entire directory tree with files.
This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything. Some notes: 1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent. 2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding. 3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query 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: