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

A simple X11 tea timer
wrapping the snippet in $( )& puts the whole thing in the background so you don't tie up your login session.

bash/ksh function: given a file, cd to the directory it lives
fcd : file change directory A bash function that takes a fully qualified file path and cd's into the directory where it lives. Useful on the commadline when you have a file name in a variable and you'd like to cd to the directory to RCS check it in or look at other files associated with it. Will run on any ksh, bash, likely sh, maybe zsh.

SED - Substitute string in next line
source: http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt

backs up at the date today

When was your OS installed?
Show time and date when you installed your OS.

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

identify exported sonames in a path
This provides a list of shared object names (sonames) that are exported by a given tree. This is usually useful to make sure that a given required dependency (NEEDED entry) is present in a firmware image tree. The shorter (usable) version for it would be $ scanelf -RBSq -F "+S#f" But I used the verbose parameters in the command above, for explanation.

Fix VirtualBox error

Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)
$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}' 205413 real 0m0.497s user 0m0.220s sys 0m0.268s $ time { ls |wc -l; } 205413 real 0m3.776s user 0m3.340s sys 0m0.424s ********* ** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster: $ find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; } 205414 real 0m0.456s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.328s ** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version $ perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' 205414 real 0m0.415s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.232s

Find all files of a type and copy them elsewhere while keeping intact their full directory structure using find and cpio
.flac is the filetype. /Volumes/Music/FLAC is the destination.


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: