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 the package that installed a command

Find today created files

Output system statistics every 5 seconds with timestamp
See man vmstat for information about the statistics. This does the same thing without the timestamp: $vmstat 5

Watch the disk fill up
While copying a large file that may take up a good chunk of your hard drive, start the copy and run this command concurrently. It will print out the disk information every second. It's pretty handy when you have a large copy with nothing to monitor the progress.

Convert encoding of given files from one encoding to another

Copy all files. All normal files, all hidden files and all files starting with - (minus).
./* is for copying files starting with - .[!.]* is for copying hidden files and avoiding copying files from the parent directory. ..?* is for copying files starting with .. (avoids the directory ..) /path/to/dir the path to the directory where the files should be copied Can also be used as a script. Input argument is /path/to/dir in tcsh, replace .[!.]* with .[^.]*

Always tail/edit/grep the latest file in a directory of timestamped files
zsh only If you have this command in your history, you can always re-run it and have it reference the latest file. The glob matches all timestamped files and then the resulting array is sorted by modification time (m) and then the first element in the sorted array is chosen (the latest)

Find the package that installed a command

List all files modified by a command
This lists all files modified after calling some command using a temporal anchor.

create new branch from stashed changes
from http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Stashing Useful for when stash cannot be applied to current branch


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: