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

Grep for word in directory (recursive)
greps for search word in directory and below (defaults to cd). -i case insensitive -n shows line number -H shows file name

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

Count opening and closing braces in a string.
This function counts the opening and closing braces in a string. This is useful if you have eg long boolean expressions with many braces and you simply want to check if you didn't forget to close one.

Watch how many tcp connections there are per state every two seconds.
slighty shorter

Find the package that installed a command

Do some learning...
I like it sorted... 2> /dev/null was also needless, since our pipes already select stdin, only.

Replace php short open tags
Tired of front end developers using short open tags in your views? This will replace all instances of

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 .[^.]*

Massive change of file extension (bash)
Using bash parameters expansion

Get a list of all TODO/FIXME tasks left to be done in your project
Place this in your .bashrc (or run it once) to set the `tasks` alias. Next time you enter `tasks` into a terminal, it will give you a list of all TODO and FIXME comments in the current directory and child directories, giving you a quick overview of what you still have to do!


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: