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

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

Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)
Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir
A quick way to find and delete empty dirs, it starts in the current working directory. If you do find . -empty -type d you will see what could be removed, or to a test run.

Watch Network Service Activity in Real-time

Colorful man
That command installs "most" and make this command as the default man reader. The "most" works like "less" (the current man reader), but it render colors for manpages and may do more things. Read "man most". You can see a preview here: http://www.dicas-l.com.br/dicas-l/20090718.php

Add forgotten changes to the last git commit
It's pretty common to forgot to commit a files, be it a modification, or a brand new file. If you did forget something, git add the files you want, and then git commit --amend. It will essentially redo the last commit, with the changes you just added. It seeds the commit message with the last commit message by default. You probably shouldn't do this if you've already pushed the commit.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

intersection between two files

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

backup all your commandlinefu.com favourites to a plaintext file
Usage: clfavs username password num_favourite_commands file_in_which_to_backup


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: