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

find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir

cooking a list of numbers for calculation
When you've got a list of numbers each on its row, the ECHO command puts them on a simple line, separated by space. You can then substitute the spaces with an operator. Finally, pipe it to the BC program.

Copy specific files recursively using the same tree organization.
This command has been used to overwrite corrupted "entries" files of a corrupted subversion working copy. Note the --files-from input format.

Check a directory of PNG files for errors
Useful for checking if a large number of PNG files was downloaded successfully by verifying the built-in CRC checksum. For incomplete files, the command will print: "00002309.png EOF while reading IDAT data ERROR: 00002309.png" The process is very fast; checking 21,000 files of 5MB in size took only five minutes on a 2011 Intel mobile dual-core.

Vi - Matching Braces, Brackets, or Parentheses
This is a simple command for jumping to the matching brace, square bracket, or parentheses. For example, it can take you from the beginning of a function to the end with one key stroke. To delete everything between the pairs of {}, [], or (), issue the command: $ d% To replace text between pairs of braces, brackets, or parentheses, issue the command: $ c% You can also use this command to find out if an opening brace has been properly closed.

Rename files in batch

Download files linked in a RSS feed
The difference between the original version provided and this one is that this one works rather than outputting a wget error

Count the number of characters in a string from the standard input.

Run a command when a file is changed

Display duplicated lines in a file
Displays the duplicated lines in a file and their occuring frequency.


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: