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

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

Generate random password
Generates password consisting of alphanumeric characters, defaults to 16 characters unless argument given.

Diff 2 file struct - Useful for branch diff and jars diff(uncompressed)
This is usefull to diff 2 paths in branches of software, or in different versions of a same zip file. So you can get the real file diff.

get a mysqldump with a timestamp in the filename and gzip it all in one go
Performs a mysqldump and gzip-compresses the output file with a timestamp in the resulting dump file. Inspect the file for integrity or fun with this command afterward, if you desire: $ zcat mysqldump-2009-06-12-07.41.01.tgz | less

continuously check size of files or directories
very handy if you copy or download a/some file(s) and want to know how big it is at the moment

unbuffered python output
You have a python script that slowly prints output, you want to pipe the output to grep or tee, and you are impatient and want to watch the results right away. Rather than modify your script (making it slightly less efficient), use the -u option to have the output unbuffered.

Factory reset your harddrive. (BE CAREFUL!)

Automatically find and re-attach to a detached screen session
-RR option is used to resume the first appropriate detached screen session

AWS Route53 hosted zone export
Frustrated with the manual domain migration process AWS has, I unsuccessfully tried to install cli53, route53-transfer. I instead wrote this oneliner to ease the export (which is not supported via the AWS console ATM). The output can be easily pasted into the "Import Hosted Zone" dialog in Route53. SOA/NS records are excluded since they cannot be automatically imported.

find and delete files smaller than specific size


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: