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

set desktop background to highest-rated image from Reddit /r/wallpapers
You'll need "feh" to set the background from the commandline. Install with "apt-get install feh" Thanks to the Redditors on this thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bira4/is_there_a_linux_version_of_this_preferably_a/

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

find out which directories in /home have the most files currently open

move contents of the current directory to the parent directory, then remove current directory.
Robust means of moving all files up by a directory. Will handle dot files, filenames containing spaces, and filenames with almost any printable characters. Will not handle filenames containing a single-quote (but if you are moving those, it's time to go yell at whoever created them in the first place).

Google Spell Checker
I took matthewbauer's cool one-liner and rewrote it as a shell function that returns all the suggestions or outputs "OK" if it doesn't find anything wrong. It should work on ksh, zsh, and bash. Users that don't have tee can leave that part off like this: $spellcheck(){ typeset y=$@;curl -sd "$y" https://google.com/tbproxy/spell|sed -n '/s="[1-9]"/{s/]*>/ /g;s/\t/ /g;s/ *\(.*\)/Suggestions: \1\n/g;p}';}

Open (in vim) all modified files in a git repository
For editing files added to the index: $ vim `git diff --name-only --cached` To edit all changed files: $ vim `git diff --name-only HEAD` To edit changed files matching glob: $ vim `git diff --name-only -- '*.html'` If the commands needs to support filenames with whitespace, it gets a bit hacky (see http://superuser.com/questions/336016/invoking-vi-through-find-xargs-breaks-my-terminal-why for the reason): $ git diff --name-only -z | xargs -0 bash -c '

ubuntu easter eggs

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Replace duplicate files by hardlinks

Monitor logs in Linux using Tail
Works in Ubuntu, I hope it will work on all Linux machines. For Unixes, tail should be capable of handling more than one file with '-f' option. This command line simply take log files which are text files, and not ending with a number, and it will continuously monitor those files. Putting one alias in .profile will be more useful.


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: