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

Get all possible problems from any log files
Using the grep command, retrieve all lines from any log files in /var/log/ that have one of the problem states

In place line numbering
Add permanent line numbers to a file without creating a temp file. The rm command deletes file10 while the nl command works on the open file descriptor of file10 which it outputs into a new file again named file10. The new file10 will now be numbered in the same directory with the same file name and content as before, but it will in fact be a new file, using (ls -i) to show its inode number will prove this.

bash shell expansion
The expansion {,} in bash will repeat the given string once for each item seperated by commas. The given command will result in the following being run: cp /really/long/path/and/file/name /really/long/path/and/file/name-`date -I` These can be embedded as needed, ex: rm file{1,2,3{1,2,3}} would delete the files file1, file2, file31, file32, file32, and no other files.

Get Dell Service Tag Number from a Dell Machine
This will give you the Dell Service tag number associated with your machine. Incredibly useful when you need that number for tech support or downloads.

Move all but the newest 100 emails to a gzipped archive

Rename files in batch

all out
How to force a userid to log out of a Linux host, by killing all processes owned by the user, including login shells:

Export a directory to all clients via NFSv4, read/write.
This exports a directory to the world in read/write mode. It is useful for quick, temporary NFS exports. Consider restricting the clients to a subnet or to specific hosts for security reasons (the client can be specified before the colon). On the client: mount -t nfs4 hostname:/ /mountpoint To terminate all of the exports (after unmounting on the client): exportfs -u -a Leave out the fsid=0 option if you don't want NFSv4. This works under recent versions of Linux.

Lurk what's going on on remote console

give me back my sound card
for when a program is hogging the sound output. finds, and kills. add -9 to the end for wedged processes. add in 'grep ^program' after lsof to filter.


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: