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

Print unique ipaddresses as they come in from Apache Access Log File
Prints the unique IP Addresses as they arrive from an Apache `access.log` file. The '-W interactive' tells awk to start writing to stdout immediately and not buffer the output. This command builds on the uniq lines without sorting command (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4389/remove-duplicate-entries-in-a-file-without-sorting.)

Find and delete oldest file of specific types in directory tree
This works on my ubuntu/debian machines. I suspect other distros need some tweaking of sort and cut. I am sure someone could provide a shorter/faster version.

print date 24 hours ago

Netcat & Tar
Create a tarball on the client and send it across the network with netcat on port 1234 where its extracted on the server in the current directory.

Slugify: converts strings in any language into Slugs (friendly names to use in URLs and filenames)
Slug the part of an URL which identifies a page using human-readable keywords. Slugs are used to construct friendly URLs (often for permalinks) that are easy to type, descriptive, and easy to remember.

tar copy
Just a copy of a big dir when you wan't things like ownership and date etc etc to be untouched. Note: Updated with the ideas from "mpb".

Merge PDFs into single file

Recompress all text files in a subdirectory with lzma
This will deal nicely with filenames containing newlines and will run one lzma process per CPU core. It requires GNU Parallel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

Get backup from remote host, then expand in current directory using tar


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: