Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

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:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

All commands

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 10,707 results
cat /proc/acpi/battery/*/state
2010-06-13 23:00:54
User: adrruiz
Functions: cat
Tags: battery acpi
-2
Up
Down
Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find -maxdepth 1 -type d | while read dir; do echo $dir; echo cmd2; done
2013-04-29 10:15:13
User: techie
Functions: echo find read
-2
Up
Down
Process each item with multiple commands (in while loop)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
purple-remote "msn:getinfo?screenname=xxx"
2010-01-13 03:29:32
User: newdongyuwei
-2
Up
Down
get msn buddy's info
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cd "~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Mobile Applications";ls > filepath
2012-05-04 08:52:06
User: miccaman
Functions: cd ls
Tags: ipad
-2
Up
Down
export iPad App list to txt file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
sudo hal-get-property --udi /org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer --key 'system.formfactor'
2012-02-06 19:44:44
User: 0disse0
Functions: sudo
-2
Up
Down
I am using a desktop?
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
files -type f | xargs -n100 | while read l; do mkdir $((++f)); cp $l $f; done
2011-02-15 23:15:16
User: flatcap
Functions: cp mkdir read xargs
Tags: find xargs read mkdir cp
-2
Up
Down
Reorder file with max 100 file per folder

Take a folder full of files and split it into smaller folders containing a maximum number of files. In this case, 100 files per directory.

find creates the list of files

xargs breaks up the list into groups of 100

for each group, create a directory and copy in the files

Note: This command won't work if there is whitespace in the filenames (but then again, neither do the alternative commands :-)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
curl icanhazip.com
2010-06-14 18:47:11
User: pykler
Tags: Network curl ip address
-2
Up
Down
Get your external IP address

With a lolcat favicon if you access it from your browser

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ps -a |grep cat |wc -l
2010-09-22 23:57:19
User: schmiddim
Functions: cat grep ps wc
-2
Up
Down
count how many cat processes are running
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "ls" > script.bash; gpg -c script.bash; cat script.bash.gpg | gpg -d --no-mdc-warning | bash
2013-03-10 09:34:12
User: betsubetsu
Functions: cat echo gpg
Tags: bash GPG Encryption password
-2
Up
Down
How to execute and encrypted and password-protected bash script?

echo "ls" > script.bash;

This is my script, a simple 'ls'.

gpg -c script.bash;

Here I encrypt and passord-protect my script. This creates file script.bash.gpg.

cat script.bash.gpg | gpg -d --no-mdc-warning | bash

Here I open file script.bash.gpg, decrypt it and execute it.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
perl -lpe'1 while s/^([-+]?\d+)(\d{3})/$1.$2/'
2009-02-18 21:54:22
User: sil
Functions: perl
-2
Up
Down
Inserting a decimal every third digit

self explanatory see sample output

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for k in *.png; do convert $k -crop <width>x<high>+<cropwidth>+<cropthigh> <newpath>/$k; done
2011-11-14 17:04:15
User: mrehqe
-2
Up
Down
batch crop images whit imagemagik

Crop several images by imagemagik's convert command. substitute , ,, with pixel value and with a different existent directory.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -f file | egrep --color=always $\|PATTERN
2009-10-15 13:08:30
User: sitaram
Functions: egrep file tail
Tags: color
-2
Up
Down
tail, with specific pattern colored

but you can't see the colors in that sample output :(

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in `mailq | awk '$6 ~ /^frozen$/ {print $3}'`; do exim -Mrm $i; done
2010-01-13 21:28:45
User: rjamestaylor
Functions: awk
Tags: bash awk exim
-2
Up
Down
Purge frozen messages in Exim

Although Exim will purge frozen (undeliverable) messages over time, the command "exim -Mrm #id#" where #id# is a particular message ID will purge a message immediately. Being lazy, I don't want to type the command for each frozen message, so I wrote the one-liner to do it for me.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
umount -l /media/foo
2009-02-16 02:51:49
User: nomad
Functions: umount
-2
Up
Down
Unmount locked filesystems.

Will unmount a mount that has already dropped but is locked by a process.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
exipick -zi | xargs exim -Mrm
2010-01-13 21:53:43
User: markszabo
Functions: xargs
Tags: bash awk exim
-2
Up
Down
Purge frozen messages in Exim
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo "alias sudo=\"aplay annoyingsoundfile.ogg\"" >> .bash_aliases
2010-06-16 10:20:15
User: Davidc3
Functions: echo
-2
Up
Down
Rickroll your users who try to sudo
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cut -f1 -d"<TAB>"
2011-05-05 18:17:36
User: dennisfaust
Functions: cut
-2
Up
Down
cut with tab or other white space chars
cut -f1 -d\<TAB>
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for i in **/*.gif; convert $i $i:r.jpg
2009-02-18 22:29:33
User: manuw
-2
Up
Down
Convert images (foo.gif => foo.jpg)
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
pgrep -c cat
2010-09-23 11:57:46
User: dog
-2
Up
Down
count how many cat processes are running
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
printf "%02d:%02d\n" $(curl -s "http://search.twitter.com/search?from=zurvollenstunde&rpp=1" | grep -E '(Es ist jetzt|ago)' | sed 's/<[^>]*>//g;s/[^[:digit:]]//g' | xargs )
2011-06-19 18:16:00
User: torrid
Functions: grep printf sed xargs
-2
Up
Down
Get the rough (german) time from Twitter by @zurvollenstunde

Calc the rough time from Twitter. Now with leading Zeroes.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tar cpof - src |( cd des; tar xpof -)
2009-09-20 20:43:30
User: davidpotter42
Functions: cd tar
-2
Up
Down
Bulk copy large blocks of data between File Systems (run as root iff you do not own all of the files!)

Using tape archive create a tar file in Stdout (-) and pipe that into a compound command to extract the tar file from Stdin at the destination. This similar to "Copy via tar pipe ...", but copies across file systems boundaries. I prefer to use cp -pr for copying within the same file system.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for file in *.zip; do unzip -l "$file" >> archiveindex.txt ; done;
2013-05-02 01:43:26
User: chon8a
Functions: file
Tags: unzip
-2
Up
Down
Write in a text file the contents of all the zip files in a directory.

It can be used to create an index of a backup directory or to find some file.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
echo -e "GET /ip HTTP/1.0\nUser-Agent: netcat\nHOST: ifconfig.me\n\n" | nc ifconfig.me 80 | sed -n '/^[0-9]/p'
2010-06-16 19:08:05
User: putnamhill
Functions: echo sed
Tags: Network netcat ip address
-2
Up
Down
Get your external IP address

Here's a version that uses netcat (although I'd much rather use curl!).

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -exec chmod 640 {} ';'
2010-07-18 21:03:38
User: lionping
Functions: chmod find
Tags: bash Ubuntu
-2
Up
Down
Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories, firm permissions
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
svn revert .
2013-03-13 06:07:42
User: zhenggc1
Tags: svn awk xargs grep
-2
Up
Down
Revert all modified files in an SVN repo
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate