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

Enter parameter if empty (script becomes interactive when parameters are missing)
Can be used for command line parameters too. If you have a more complicated way of entering values (validation, GUI, ...), then write a function i.e. EnterValue() that echoes the value and then you can write: $ param=${param:-$(EnterValue)}

Indent a one-liner.
I often write a one-liner which I want to use later in a script.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Delete all non-printing characters from a file
tr has some predefined sets of characters that are more convenient to use than characters codes

Copy a file from a remote server to your local box using on-the-fly compression
-P displays a progress meter -z tells rsync to use compression

Emulate tail using awk.
This awk codes emulates tail. For efficiency it uses a circular array, which stores only N number of records. Using awk gives the flexibility of modifying the output as needed, for example adding the record number (NR) at the output and much more.

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
Scrap everything and use `gawk` to do all the magic, since it's like the future or something. $ gawk 'match($11, /[a-z]{3}$/) && match($9, /^ata-/) { gsub("../", ""); print $11,"\t",$9 }' Yank out only ata- lines that have a drive letter (ignore lines with partitions). Then strip ../../ and print the output. Yay awk. Be sure to see the alternatives as my initial command is listed there. This one is a revision of the original.

Rename files in batch

ANSI 256 Color Test
Terminal Color tester using python, works with py2 and 3

Count lines of code across multiple file types, sorted by least amount of code to greatest
The same as the other two alternatives, but now less forking! Instead of using '\;' to mark the end of an -exec command in GNU find, you can simply use '+' and it'll run the command only once with all the files as arguments. This has two benefits over the xargs version: it's easier to read and spaces in the filesnames work automatically (no -print0). [Oh, and there's one less fork, if you care about such things. But, then again, one is equal to zero for sufficiently large values of zero.]


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: