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

enumerate with padding
bash2 : for X in $(seq 1 5); do printf "%03g " "$X";done bash3 : for X in {1..5}; do printf "%03g " "$X";done bash4 : echo {001..5}

Display total Kb/Mb/Gb of a folder and each file

Rename file to same name plus datestamp of last modification.
Note that the -i will not help in a script. Proper error checking is required.

Quick HTML image gallery from folder contents with Perl
This includes a title attribute so you can see the file name by hovering over an image. Also will hoover up any image format - jpg, gif and png.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
This command works by rsyncing the target directory (containing the files you want to delete) with an empty directory. The '--delete' switch instructs rsync to remove files that are not present in the source directory. Since there are no files there, all the files will be deleted. I'm not clear on why it's faster than 'find -delete', but it is. Benchmarks here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130929001850/http://linuxnote.net/jianingy/en/linux/a-fast-way-to-remove-huge-number-of-files.html

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase
This will convert filenames from uppercase to lowercase. I find this useful after downloading images from my digital camera. This works for English, but other languages may need something slightly more complex like this: $ for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(echo $i|tr [:upper:] [:lower:])"; done Also, the quote marks aren't necessary if your filenames don't contain spaces.

remove the last of all html files in a directory
sed can be used deleting the last line and with -i option, there's no need to for temp files, the change is made on the actual file

Create passwords and store safely with gpg
Adjust the $ head -c part for password length. I use filenames like "hans@commandlinefu.com.gpg" and a vim which automatically decrypts files with .gpg suffixes.

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"

Count the total number of files in each immediate subdirectory
counts the total (recursive) number of files in the immediate (depth 1) subdirectories as well as the current one and displays them sorted. Fixed, as per ashawley's comment


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: