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

find matching wholename example

sed /pat/!d without using sed (no RE; limited to shell patterns aka globbing)
POSIX requires this "string truncating" functionality. might as well use it, at least for very small tasks where invoking sed and using RE is overkill.

Syntax highlight PHP source
Creates HTML code from PHP source

Fast command-line directory browsing
Not really alternative, just giving a different behavior listing current directory if no directory given.

Human readable directory sizes for current directory, sorted descending

Give any files that don't already have it group read permission under the current folder (recursive)
Makes any files in the current directory (and any sub-directories) group-readable. Using the "! -perm /g=r" limits the number of files to only those that do not already have this property Using "+" on the end of the -exec body tells find to build the entire command by appending all matching files before execution, so invokes chmod once only, not once per file.

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"

View disk usage

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.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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: