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

Truncate long strings in columns and use custom header names
Using the --table-truncate ( -T ) option, you can specify the columns you will allow to be truncated. This helps when you have some columns that are unusually long, or a small terminal window. In this example we will print out the /etc/passwd file in columns. We are using a colon as our separator ( -s: ), defining that we want table output ( -t ), defining the column names ( -N ) and allowing the column NAME to be truncated ( -T ).

Automator Bash script to create Clean zips in MacOS Finder without __MACOSX metadata
Finder compresses to ZIP but always includes extraneous metadata files (__MACOSX and .DS_Store) files and folders that may confuse other programs. One alternative is creating them and then editing the ZIP. This can work standalone or in an automator script accepting multiple selections (files or folders) and creating one zip per argument/selected file without that metada.

Delete All Objects From An S3 Bucket Using S3cmd

Get Your IP Geographic Location with curl and jq

open a seperate konsole tab and ssh to each of N servers (konsole 4.2+)
creates a new tab for each of N servers in listofservers.txt and ssh's to said servers then, try the "send to all sessions" feature of konsole to do the same work on all servers at the same time. BIG time saver, but be careful!

A command to post a message and an auto-shortened link to Twitter. The link shortening service is provide by TinyURL.
A command to post a message and an auto-shortened link to Twitter. The link shortening service is provided by TinyURL.

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"

Setting global redirection of STDERR to STDOUT in a script
You have a script where =ALL= STDERR should be redirected to STDIN and you don't want to add "2>&1" at the end of each command... E.G.: $ ls -al /foo/bar 2>&1 Than just add this piece of code at the beginning of your script! I hope this can help someone. :)

convert a line to a space

Get names of files in /dev, a USB device is attached to
This command lists the names of your USB devices connected and what file in /dev they are using. It's pretty useful if you don't have an automount option in your desktop or you don't have any graphical enviroment.


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: