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).

Commands by cp

Commands by cp from sorted by
Terminal - Commands by cp - 12 results
mosh myLogin@myHost
2012-06-08 06:44:28
User: cp
-1
Up
Down
connecting to your server using the the mobile shell

Mosh is a "remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes. Mosh is a replacement for SSH. It's more robust and responsive, especially over Wi-Fi, cellular, and long-distance links. Mosh is free software, available for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X." (Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V from http://mosh.mit.edu).

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias QUERY='psql -h $MYDBHOST -p 5432 -d $MYDB -U $MYLOGIN --no-align'
2011-04-08 12:44:33
User: cp
Functions: alias
1
Up
Down
lazy SQL QUERYING

alias for psql command line; works similar for Oracles sqlplus commandline interface.

if you do not provide stdin you will end up in the db shell.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lftp -ulogin,passwd -e "mirror --reverse /my/from/dir/ /ftp/target/dir/" ftp.server.xx
2011-04-01 12:40:11
User: cp
Functions: lftp
7
Up
Down
mirrors directory to a ftp server

http://lftp.yar.ru/

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
screen /dev/ttyS0 9600
2011-03-09 07:56:34
User: cp
Functions: screen
6
Up
Down
connects to a serial console

e.g., 'screen -L /dev/ttyUSB0 38400' listens to your Holux M-241 GPS logger and turns on automatic logging

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f | awk -F'.' '{print $NF}' | sort| uniq -c | sort -g
2011-02-14 09:15:29
User: cp
Functions: awk find sort uniq
Tags: uniq ls grep
7
Up
Down
list all file extensions in a directory

... plus do a sort according frequency

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type f -mtime +100 -exec tar rvf my.tar --remove-files {} \;
2011-01-26 06:13:19
User: cp
Functions: find tar
4
Up
Down
tar and remove files which are older that 100 days

tar does not have a -mtime option as find. tar appends all the file to an existing tar file.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ssh -C -Y -l$USER xserver.mynet.xx 'Xnest -geometry 1900x1150 -query localhost'
2010-07-22 06:26:35
User: cp
Functions: ssh
10
Up
Down
runs a X session within your X session

http://www.debian-administration.org/article/Running_multiple_X11_sessions

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
indent -kr hello.c
2010-07-14 07:16:15
User: cp
Tags: indent
9
Up
Down
Use Kernighan & Ritchie coding style in C program
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
c=0; n=8; while true; do r=`echo $RANDOM%5 |bc`; echo "sleep $r"; sleep $r& 2>&1 >/dev/null && ((c++)); [ `echo "$c%$n" | bc` -eq 0 ] && echo "$c waiting" && wait; done
2010-07-08 13:56:28
User: cp
Functions: echo sleep
5
Up
Down
'hpc' in the box - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel

the block of the loop is useful whenever you have huge junks of similar jobs, e.g., convert high res images to thumbnails, and make usage out of all the SMP power on your compute box without flooding the system.

note: c is used as counter and the random sleep

r=`echo $RANDOM%5 |bc`; echo "sleep $r"; sleep $r

is just used as a dummy command.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cu -s 9600 -l /dev/ttyS0
2010-07-08 06:33:55
User: cp
4
Up
Down
connects to a serial console

cu (call UNIX) establishes a full-duplex connection to another machine (*BSD) using a serial console.

It becames more useful than screen if you have to send a BREAK signal. using cu just type "~#".

man cu

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=cu&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&arch=i386&format=html

Show sample output | Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat WAR_AND_PEACE_By_LeoTolstoi.txt | tr -cs "[:alnum:]" "\n"| tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | awk '{h[$1]++}END{for (i in h){print h[i]" "i}}'|sort -nr | cat -n | head -n 30
2010-07-05 06:39:20
User: cp
Functions: awk cat head sort tr
11
Up
Down
computes the most frequent used words of a text file

using

cat WAR_AND_PEACE_By_LeoTolstoi.txt | tr -cs "[:alnum:]" "\n"| tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sort -S16M | uniq -c |sort -nr | cat -n | head -n 30

("sort -S1G" - Linux/GNU sort only) will also do the job but as some drawbacks (caused by space/time complexity of sorting) for bigger files...

Show sample output | Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
cat my.ps | nc -q 1 hp4550.mynet.xx 9100
2010-07-05 06:12:12
User: cp
Functions: cat
10
Up
Down
sends a postscript file to a postscript printer using netcat
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate