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

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

grep binary (hexadecimal) patterns
-P activates the Perl regular expression mode.

Create a tar archive using xz compression
compress directory archive with xz compression, if tar doesn't have the -J option (OSX tar doesn't have -J)

vi a new file with execution mode
$ vix /tmp/script.sh Open a file directly with execution permission. Put the function in your .bashrc You can also put this in your vimrc: $ command XX w | set ar | silent exe "!chmod +x %" | redraw! and open a new file like this: $ vi +XX /tmp/script.sh

Find the package that installed a command

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Get all mac address

Create the authorization header required for a Twitter stream feed
This is the FOURTH in a set of five commands. Please see my other commands for the previous three steps. This command builds the authorization header required by Twitter. For this command to work, see my previous 3 commands (step1, step2 and step3) as they are required to build the environment variables used in this command. For more information on the authorization header, go to dev.twitter.com/apps, click on any of your apps (or create a new one) and then click on the "OAuth Tool" tab.

check the fucking weather
grab the weather, with a little expletive fun. replace the 48104 with a US zipcode, or the name of your city (such as ZIP="oslo"), unless you want to know what the weather is like for me (and that's fine too)

online MAC address lookup


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: