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

Simulate typing but with mistakes
The output will show jerk, then wonderful person since echo parses the \b character.

check python syntax in vim

Update twitter via curl
Doesn't require password (asks for it instead)

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
This command works by rsyncing the target directory (containing the files you want to delete) with an empty directory. The '--delete' switch instructs rsync to remove files that are not present in the source directory. Since there are no files there, all the files will be deleted. I'm not clear on why it's faster than 'find -delete', but it is. Benchmarks here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130929001850/http://linuxnote.net/jianingy/en/linux/a-fast-way-to-remove-huge-number-of-files.html

umount all nfs mounts on machine

quickly rename a file

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

List all the files that have been deleted while they were still open.
If your customer deletes a file that is still in use by a process, that space does not get freed up (will not show up in df) until that process either closes the file on its own, or is killed.

Recursively Add Changed Files to Subversion
Extracted from http://www.howtogeek.com/wiki/Recursively_Add_Changed_Files_to_Subversion

Create a nifty overview of the hardware in your computer
After the command is done, open the html file in a browser


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: