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

Colorful man
That command installs "most" and make this command as the default man reader. The "most" works like "less" (the current man reader), but it render colors for manpages and may do more things. Read "man most". You can see a preview here: http://www.dicas-l.com.br/dicas-l/20090718.php

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

Print all the lines between 10 and 20 of a file
Subtly different to the -n+p method... and probably wrong in so many ways....... But it's shorter. Just.

Use the builtin ':' bash command to increment variables
I just found another use for the builtin ':' bash command. It increments counters for me in a loop if a certain condition is met... : [arguments] No effect; the command does nothing beyond expanding arguments and performing any specified redirections. A zero exit code is returned.

Rename all images in current directory to filename based on year, month, day and time based on exif information

Create an easy to pronounce shortened URL from CLI
Just add this function to your .zshrc / .bashrc, and by typing "shout *URL*" you get a randomly chosen English word that ShoutKey.com uses to short your URL. You may now go to shoutkey.com/*output_word* and get redirected. The URL will be valid for 5 minutes. (I've never used sed before, so I'll be quite glad if someone could straighten up the sed commands and combine them (perhaps also removing the whitespace). If so, I'll update it right away ;) )

Send a backup job to a remote tape drive on another machine over SSH
I use this all the time for taking manual backups of stuff i want to keep but not important enough to backup regularly.

Salvage a borked terminal
Also works in places where reset does not.

Download an entire ftp directory using wget
If the username includes an @ you can use this one: wget -r --user=username_here --password=pass_here ftp://ftp.example.com

List the Sizes of Folders and Directories
I wanted an easy way to list out the sizes of directories and all of the contents of those directories recursively.


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: