All commands

All commands (14,187)

sorted by

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Using xargs is better than: find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
12

find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

root · 2009-01-26 11:30:47 62
Display PHP files that directly instantiate a given class

This greps all PHP files for a given classname and displays both the file and the usage. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
tao/tests/filter/TestUrl.php:        $this->objFilter = new filter_Url();
tao/classes/local/view/Photos.php:        $objFilter  = new filter_Url();
```
1

find . -name "*.php" -exec grep \-H "new filter_" {} \;

root · 2009-01-26 10:43:09 73
Run the last command as root

Useful when you forget to use sudo for a command. "!!" grabs the last run command.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
1219

sudo !!

root · 2009-01-26 10:26:48 250
Creates a customized search command

Creates a command alias ('cr' in the above example) that searches the contents of files matching a set of file extensions (C & C++ source-code in the above example) recursively within the current directory. Search configured to be in colour, ignore-case, show line numbers and show 4 lines of context. Put in shell initialisation file of your choice. Trivially easy to use, e.g: cr sha1_init Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
./openssl/signatures.c-600-xmlSecOpenSSLDsaSha1EvpInit(EVP_MD_CTX *ctx)
./openssl/signatures.c-601-{
./openssl/signatures.c:602:    return SHA1_Init(ctx->md_data);
./openssl/signatures.c-603-}
./openssl/signatures.c-604-
--
./openssl/signatures.c-706-    NULL,
./openssl/signatures.c-707-#else /* XMLSEC_OPENSSL_096 */
./openssl/signatures.c:708:    SHA1_Init,
./openssl/signatures.c-709-    SHA1_Update,
./openssl/signatures.c-710-    SHA1_Final,
```
0

alias cr='find . 2>/dev/null -regex '\''.*\.$c\|cpp\|pc\|h\|hpp\|cc$$'\'' | xargs grep --color=always -ni -C2'

chrisdrew · 2009-01-26 08:54:25 56
Outputs a sorted list of disk usage to a text file

Recursively searches current directory and outputs sorted list of each directory's disk usage to a text file. Show Sample Output
This is sample output - yours may be different.
```
712     .
328     ./test
176     ./lib
144     ./doc
100     ./test/data
96      ./lib/rake
64      ./doc/release_notes
```
6

du | sort -gr > file_sizes

chrisdrew · 2009-01-26 01:12:54 62
Watch how fast the files in a drive are being deleted

This can be useful when a large remove operation is taking place.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
6

watch "df | grep /path/to/drive"

root · 2009-01-25 21:16:41 674
Execute a command at a given time

This is an alternative to cron which allows a one-off task to be scheduled for a certain time.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
266

echo "ls -l" | at midnight

root · 2009-01-25 21:07:42 85
Analyse an Apache access log for the most common IP addresses

This uses awk to grab the IP address from each request and then sorts and summarises the top 10.
This is sample output - yours may be different.
22

tail -10000 access_log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail

root · 2009-01-25 21:01:52 47
Add SVN keywords property to all PHP and Javascript files
This is sample output - yours may be different.
3

find . $ -name "*.php" -o -name "*.js" $ -exec svn propset svn:keywords Id {} \;

root · 2009-01-24 00:54:35 63
Count files beneath current directory (including subfolders)
This is sample output - yours may be different.
18

find . -type f | wc -l

root · 2009-01-23 17:19:32 74

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

ps returns all running processes which are then sorted by the 4th field in numerical order and the top 10 are sent to STDOUT. Show Sample Output

106

ps aux | sort -nk +4 | tail

root · 2009-01-23 17:12:33 294

Checks all MySQL tables

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/myisamchk.html for further details. You can also repair all tables by running: myisamchk -r *.MYI
This is sample output - yours may be different.
-2

myisamchk /path/to/mysql/files/*.MYI

root · 2009-01-22 10:20:00 133
‹ First < 566 567 568

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

Send youtube video to Kodi

Kodi needs the youtube plugin to be installed.

Get a regular updated list of zombies

Shows all those processes; useful when building some massively forking script that could lead to zombies when you don't have your waitpid()'s done just right.

.inputrc keybinding to wrap current line in inotifytools for instant compile/test-as-you-save-loop

Assuming you've written all of make -j hfst-tokenize && echo doavtter gr?dakursa|./hfst-tokenize --gtd tokeniser-gramcheck-gt-desc.pmhfst and want that to execute every time you :w in vim (or C-xC-s in Emacs), just hit and it'll turn into $ while true; do ( make -j hfst-tokenize && e doavtter gr?dakursa|./hfst-tokenize --gtd tokeniser-gramcheck-gt-desc.pmhfst ); inotifywait -q -e modify -e close_write *; done with the cursor right before the ')'. Hit enter, and it'll run on each save. Requires the package inotify-tools installed.

Convert CSV to JSON

Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

See a full list of compiler defined symbols

From http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/01/msg00971.html .

C one-liners

$ /lib/ld-linux.so.2 is the runtime linker/loader for ELF binaries on Linux. =(cmd) is a zsh trick to take the output for the command "inside" it and save it to a temporary file. $ echo -e 'blah' | gcc -x c -o /dev/stdout - pipes the C source to gcc. -x c tells gcc that it's compiling C (which is required if it's reading from a pipe). -o /dev/stdout - tells it to write the binary to standard output and read the source from standard input. because of the the =() thing, the compiled output is stashed in a tempfile, which the loader then runs and executes, and the shell tosses the tempfile away immediately after running it.

Download all images from a 4chan thread

Useful for ripping wallpaper from 4chan.org/wg

rotate a one page pdf to 90 Degrees Clockwise

This can be taken from the pdftk docs http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-man-page/ http://www.pdflabs.com/docs/pdftk-cli-examples/ , but the command examples are not simple.

vim multiple files at one time, split vertically.

Remove ( color / special / escape / ANSI ) codes, from text, with sed

Remove ( color / special / escape / ANSI ) codes, from text, with sed Credit to the original folks who I've copied this command from. The diff here is: Theirs: [m|K] Theirs is supposed to remove \E[NUMBERS;NUMBERS[m OR K] This statement is incorrect in 2 ways. 1. The letters m and K are two of more than 20+ possible letters that can end these sequences. 2. Inside []'s , OR is already assumed, so they are also looking for sequences ending with | which is not correct. This : [a-zA-Z] This resolves the "OR" issue noted above, and takes care of all sequences, as they all end with a lower or upper cased letter. This ensures 100% of any escape code 'mess' is removed.

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)

All commands (14,187) the last day the last week the last month all time sorted by date votes

What's this?

Check These Out

Stay in the loop…

All commands (14,187)

sorted by