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

Find last modified files in a directory and its subdirectories
Goes through all files in the directory specified, uses `stat` to print out last modification time, then sorts numerically in reverse, then uses cut to remove the modified epoch timestamp and finally head to only output the last 10 modified files. Note that on a Mac `stat` won't work like this, you'll need to use either: $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f '%m%t%Sm %12z %N' | sort -nr | cut -f2- | head or alternatively do a `brew install coreutils` and then replace `stat` with `gstat` in the original command.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

A video capture command which can be assigned to a keyboard shortcut.
A video capture command which can be assigned to a keyboard shortcut.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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

Sort output by column
(separator = $IFS)

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Get a list of all your VirtualBox virtual machines by name and UUID from the shell
A similar command that lists only the currently running VMs is thus: $ VBoxManage list runningvms ...the above showing a list of VMs by name and UUID in the same format as the "$ VBoxManage list vms" command

Capture SMTP / POP3 Email

Output a list of svn repository entities to xml file
I use this to pull the last commit date for everything in my repo, so I can tell the client which files haven't been touched or updated since the repo was created. Another way to do it is to use svn log, but that does not pull the "kind" attribute. It does, however, give you the commit message. Both are very useful.


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: