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

Changes standard mysql client output to 'less'.
Changes standard mysql client output to 'less'. In another words makes query results of mysql command line client to look much better.

Find and list users who talk like "lolcats"
Greps IRC logs for phrases and lists users who said them.

Force the script to be started as root
Place this code at the beginning of your script to ensure that it can only be executed by the root.

Permanent mysql ssh tunnel to server

See system users

Pause Current Thread
Hold ctrl and press z to pause the current thread. Run $fg to resume it.

Using netcat to copy files between servers
It bypasses encryption overhead of SSH and depending on configuration can be significantly faster. It's recommended to use only in trusted networks.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Top 30 History
Top 30 History Command line with histogram display

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: