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

Compress blank lines

cat a bunch of small files with file indication
If you have a bunch of small files that you want to cat to read, you can cat each alone (boring); do a cat *, and you won't see what line is for what file, or do a grep . *. "." will match any string and grep in multifile mode will place a $filename: before each matched line. It works recursively too!!

Copy structure
Clone directory structure without the files

Delete empty, 24-hours-old directories recursively, without consider hidden directories

print contents of file from line 1 until we match regex
Start printing the contents of filename to stdout, until a matching line to regex is found, then stop.

Find name of package which installed a given shell command
Some command names are very different from the name of the package that installed them. Sometimes, you may want to find out the name of the package that provided a command on a system, so that you can install it on another system.

Perl Command Line Interpreter
My Programming Languages professor assigned my class a homework assignment where we had to write a Perl interpreter using Perl. I really like Python's interactive command line interpreter which inspired this Perl script.

Reinstall a Synology NAS without loosing any data from commandline.
Seen many questions how-to reinstall synology nas dsm without loosing data, here you go. Wait for a few min and then head over to http://nasip and setup your fresh installed nas.

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

Forget remembered path locations of previously ran commands
i.e.: Useful if you add ~/bin to your $PATH and you want to override locations of previously ran commands and you don't want to log out and log back in to be able to use them.


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: