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

RTFM function
Same as the other rtfm's, but using the more correct xdg-open instead of $BROWSER. I can't find a way to open info only if the term exists, so it stays out of my version.

GZip all files in a directory separately

Check if it's OK to spawn tmux. Bool's Rools.
The command cechks if we are connected to a X11 console, if the $TERM var noct yet contains a "screen" derivat, and only then attachs to tmux. You could add a test for interactive shell [[ $- == *i* ]] but your .bashrc has that already, I bet.

Recursively remove .svn directories

convert unixtime to human-readable
Mac have direct conversion of seconds (Epoch time)

Detect encoding of a text file
This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

Pack up some files into a tarball on a remote server without writing to the local filesystem
I recently found myself with a filesystem I couldn't write to and a bunch of files I had to get the hell out of dodge, preferably not one at a time. This command makes it possible to pack a bunch of files into a single archive and write it to a remote server.

Find the package that installed a command

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"

Find files in multiple TAR files
A quick find command to identify all TAR files in a given path, extract a list of files contained within the tar, then search for a given string in the filelist. Returns to the user as a list of TAR files found (enclosed in []) followed by any matching files that exist in that archive. TAR can easily be swapped for JAR if required.


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: