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 from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 11,369 results
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 $(ls *.mp3); do mplayer $i && echo "delete it? [y/n]" && read trash && if [ "$trash" == "y" ]; then rm $i; fi; do
2013-12-23 20:09:56
User: wibbel4
Functions: echo ls read rm
-2
Up
Down
Listen and sort your music, with prompt for deleting

Old drive with lots of music or unsorted drive? This command will play all mp3 files in a folder and after playing one song or pressing q, it will ask you if you want to delete the file.

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
ps -cx cat
2010-09-23 12:28:07
User: krissi
Functions: ps
-2
Up
Down
count how many cat processes are running
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
x86info
2009-08-16 02:19:39
User: theIndianMaiden
Tags: system_profiler
-2
Up
Down
x86info

specific information about your intel CPUs in your system and their features

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
function lsless() { ls "$@" | less; }
2009-11-13 17:28:06
User: argherna
Functions: ls
Tags: less ls function
-2
Up
Down
Pipe ls output into less

This is useful for paging through long directories, mulitple directories, etc. I put this in my ~/.bash_aliases file and alias 'lsl' to it.

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
while (ps -ef | grep [r]unning_program_name); do sleep 10; done; command_to_execute
2010-01-14 16:26:34
User: m_a_xim
Functions: grep ps sleep
Tags: automation while process ps wait halt
-2
Up
Down
Wait for an already launched program to stop before starting a new command.

The '[r]' is to avoid grep from grepping itself. (interchange 'r' by the appropriate letter)

Here is an example that I use a lot (as root or halt will not work):

while (ps -ef | grep [w]get); do sleep 10; done; sleep 60; halt

I add the 'sleep 60' command just in case something went wrong; so that I have time to cancel.

Very useful if you are going to bed while downloading something and do not want your computer running all night.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
perl -MFile::Find=find -MFile::Spec::Functions -Tlwe '$found=1; find { wanted => sub { if (/$ARGV[0]\.pm\z/) { print canonpath $_; $found=0; } }, no_chdir => 1 }, @INC; exit $found;' Collectd/Plugins/Graphite
2013-01-11 11:01:46
User: keymon
Functions: exit find perl
-2
Up
Down
Find out if a module is installed in perl

Will check if the given module is installed in the @INC. It will print the path and return 0 if found, or 1 otherwise.

Based on script from SharpyWarpy in http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-general-1/how-to-list-all-installed-perl-modules-216603/

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mysql>use DBNAME; mysql>source FILENAME
2010-03-19 10:21:40
User: teloon
Tags: mysql
-2
Up
Down
import database
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
fold -w 1 <file> | grep -c <character>
2010-09-23 16:30:33
User: KeePon
Functions: fold grep
-2
Up
Down
counting a particular character in a file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f | xargs grep -n "Old Text" | tee filesChanged.txt | sed 's/:.*$//' | xargs sed -i 's/Old Text/New Text/g
2011-09-06 10:28:36
User: moogmusic
Functions: find grep sed tee xargs
Tags: log replace
-2
Up
Down
Find/Replace in a bunch of files and keep a log of the changes

This is a more concise answer to http://blog.commandlinekungfu.com/2011/09/episode-158-old-switcheroo.html in my opinion.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
module_exists(){ perl -e 'use '$1 2>/dev/null; }
2013-01-11 14:47:07
User: putnamhill
Functions: perl
Tags: bash perl
-2
Up
Down
Find out if a module is installed in perl

This version uses a bash function and does not print the path to the module.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . | xargs xattr -d com.apple.quarantine
2012-05-09 23:06:51
User: brockangelo
Functions: find xargs
Tags: find xattr quarantine
-2
Up
Down
Remove the Apple quarantine

When downloading files on a Mac, Apple adds the x-attribute: com.apple.quarantine. Often, this makes it so you can't even run a ./configure. This command gets rid of the quarantine for all files in the current directory.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mkpasswd -5 pa33w0rd saltsalt
2011-11-16 16:24:18
User: kev
Tags: mkpasswd
-2
Up
Down
generate /etc/shadow-style password
Show sample output | Comments (6) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
mysqladmin -u username -p create dbname
2009-02-16 07:21:07
User: vaporub
-2
Up
Down
Create a mysql database from the command line

Creates a database that could then be populated with a dump file or application.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
startx > startx.log 2>&1
2009-03-17 19:08:47
User: ed
-2
Up
Down
startx output to log file
Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate