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

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Url Encode
It only encodes non-Basic-ASCII chars, as they are the only ones not well readed by UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin-1). It converts all * C3 X (some latin symbols like ASCII-extended ones) and * C2 X (some punctuation symbols like inverted exclamation) ...UTF-8 double byte symbols to escaped form that every parser understands to form the URLs. I didn't encode spaces and the rest of basic punctuation, but supposedly, space and others are coded as \x20, for example, in UTF-8, latin-1 and Windows-cp1252.... so its read perfectly. Please feel free to correct, the application to which I designe that function works as expected with my assumption. Note: I specify a w=999, I didn't find a flag to put unlimited value. I just suppose very improbable surpass the de-facto 255 (* 3 byte max) = 765 bytes length of URL

When was your OS installed?
shows also time if its the same year or shows year if installed before actual year and also works if /etc is a link (mac os)

Preserve user variables when running commands with sudo.
In this case the current user has proxy variable set which allows access to the rpm on the internet but needs root privs to install it. Running sudo -E preserves the current user proxy var and allows the rpm install to be executed with sudo.

Download an Entire website with wget

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Copy stdin to your X11 buffer
Have you ever had to scp a file to your work machine in order to copy its contents to a mail? xclip can help you with that. It copies its stdin to the X11 buffer, so all you have to do is middle-click to paste the content of that looong file :)

sshfs usage
you can use this command for mounting local directory to a remost directory..

Get yesterday's date or a previous time
With this command you can get a previous or future date or time. Where can you use this? How about finding all files modified or created in the last 5 mins? touch -t `echo $(date -d "5 minute ago" "+%G%m%d%H%M.%S")` me && find . -type f -newer me List all directories created since last week? touch -t `echo $(date -d "1 week ago" "+%G%m%d%H%M.%S")` me && find . -type d -cnewer me I'm sure you can think of more ways to use it. Requires coreutils package.

Automaticly cd into directory
Makes bash-4.x like zsh. Automatic cd into a directory if a command with that name doesnt exists. Ready for your ~/.bashrc file


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: