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

Change Title of Terminal Window to Verbose Info useful at Login
I usually have 5 or more ssh connections to various servers, and putting this command in my .bash_profile file makes my putty window or x terminal window title change to this easily recognizable and descriptive text. Includes the username, group, server hostname, where I am connecting from (for SSH tunneling), which device pts, current server load, and how many processes are running. You can also use this for your PROMPT_COMMAND variable, which updates the window title to the current values each time you exec a command. I prefix running this in my .bash_profile with $ [[ ! -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && which makes sure it only does this when connecting via SSH with a TTY. Here's some rougher examples from http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html $ # If set, the value is executed as a command prior to issuing each primary prompt. $ #H=$((hostname || uname -n) 2>/dev/null | sed 1q);W=$(whoami) $ #export PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;${W}@${H}:${PWD/#$HOME/~} ${SSH_TTY/\/dev\//} [`uptime|sed -e "s/.*: \([^,]*\).*/\1/" -e "s/ //g"`]\007"' $ #PROMPT_COMMAND='echo -ne "\033]0;`id -un`:`id -gn`@`hostname||uname -n 2>/dev/null|sed 1q` `command who -m|sed -e "s%^.* \(pts/[0-9]*\).*(\(.*\))%[\1] (\2)%g"` [`uptime|sed -e "s/.*: \([^,]*\).*/\1/" -e "s/ //g"` / `command ps aux|wc -l`]\007"' $ #[[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] || export PROMPT_COMMAND $ #[[ -z "$SSH_TTY" ]] && [[ -f /dev/stdout ]] && SSH_TTY=/dev/stdout And here's a simple function example for setting the title: $ function set_window_title(){ echo -e "\033]0; ${1:-$USER@$HOST - $SHLVL} \007"; }

Get info about a GitHub project
In this example we search for 'vim' but vim doesn't have a project on github right now. That's ok, this command still searches for every project that has 'vim' in their description (forks, plugins, etc). To get XML or JSON output just replace 'yaml' in the url with 'xml' or 'json'.

sum a column of numbers

modify a file in place with perl
changes THIS to THAT in all files matching fileglob* without using secondary files

restoring some data from a corrupted text file
man tac When there is a bad block in the middle of your file, you can see its begninning with `cat' and its end with `tac'. But both commands terminates with an error. So this sequence rebuilds a new file without badblock.

Delete all git branches except master
Delete all your branches except master (useful after archiving branches)

Download last file from index of

list files recursively by size

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
If you want to do the same in OS X... grep as necessary for information you need....

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.


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: