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

2012-05-20 - test
test
2012-05-20 - test
test
2012-05-20 - test
test
2012-05-20 - Test tweets
YU not working?
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands tagged ls

Commands tagged ls from sorted by
Terminal - Commands tagged ls - 76 results
tree -ifs --noreport .|sort -n -k2
2012-05-04 09:18:39
User: knoppix5
Functions: sort
Tags: size ls tree directory
0
Up
Down
List all files in current dir and subdirs sorted by size

or

tree -ifsF --noreport .|sort -n -k2|grep -v '/$'

(rows presenting directory names become hidden)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
compgen -c | sort -u > commands && less commands
2012-04-27 14:19:05
User: Habitual
Functions: less sort
Tags: bash ls $PATH list of command
3
Up
Down
List all commands present on system
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls ${PATH//:/ }
2012-04-26 19:45:52
User: Zulu
Functions: ls
Tags: bash ls $PATH list of command
3
Up
Down
List all commands present on system

List all commands present on system by folder.

PATH contains all command folder separated by ':'. With ${PATH//:/ }, we change ':' in space and create a list of folder for ls command.
Show sample output | Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . -type d |sed 's:[^-][^/]*/:--:g; s:^-: |:'
2012-04-14 00:51:09
User: khopesh
Functions: find sed
Tags: ls tree
0
Up
Down
Graphical tree of sub-directories

shorter version. I believe find is faster than ls as well.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find /some/path -type f -and -printf "%f\n" | egrep -io '\.[^.]*$' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn
2012-04-02 19:25:35
User: kyle0r
Functions: egrep find sort uniq
Tags: uniq ls grep
0
Up
Down
list unique file extensions recursively for a path, include extension frequency stats

the

find -printf "%f\n" prints just the file name from the given path. This means directory paths which contain extensions will not be considered.
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -Rl dir1/ > /tmp/dir1.ls; ls -Rl dir2/ > /tmp/dir2.ls; meld /tmp/dir1.ls /tmp/dir2.ls
2012-03-04 13:06:55
User: joeseggiola
Functions: ls
Tags: diff ls directories compare
0
Up
Down
Quick and dirty recursive directory comparison

Compare the ls -Rl output of two directories in meld (you can also use diff -y instead of meld).

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -la | grep ^- | wc -l
2012-02-21 16:09:27
User: mesuutt
Functions: grep ls wc
Tags: ls wc
-6
Up
Down
Count number of files in a directory
Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find ./ -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} \; 2>/dev/null| awk '{ print $8 " : " $5}'
2012-01-21 04:19:35
User: Goez
Functions: awk find ls
Tags: awk find ls file size
0
Up
Down
Find files with size over 100MB and output with better lay-out

This command does a basic find with size. It also improves the printout given (more clearer then default)

Adjusting the ./ will alter the path.

Adjusting the "-size +100000k" will specify the size to search for.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -t | head
2012-01-17 16:28:32
User: scottlinux
Functions: ls
Tags: tail ls head,
2
Up
Down
Show last changed files in a directory

This will quickly display files last changed in a directory, with the newest on top.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -d1 $PWD/*
2011-12-31 14:46:41
User: www
Functions: ls
Tags: ls
0
Up
Down
list with full path
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -d1 $PWD/{.*,*}
2011-12-17 12:25:15
User: bunam
Functions: ls
Tags: ls
1
Up
Down
list with full path
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -a | sed "s#^#${PWD}/#"
2011-12-16 22:19:06
User: bbbco
Functions: ls sed
Tags: sed ls pwd
-9
Up
Down
list with full path

Use the -a flag to display all files, including hidden files. If you just want to display regular files, use a -1 (yes, that is the number one). Got this by RTFM and adding some sed magic.

[bbbco@bbbco-dt ~]$ ls -a | sed "s#^#${PWD}/#"

/home/bbbco/.

/home/bbbco/..

/home/bbbco/2011-09-01-00-33-02.073-VirtualBox-2934.log

/home/bbbco/2011-09-10-09-49-57.004-VirtualBox-2716.log

/home/bbbco/.adobe

/home/bbbco/.bash_history

/home/bbbco/.bash_logout

/home/bbbco/.bash_profile

/home/bbbco/.bashrc

...

[bbbco@bbbco-dt ~]$ ls -1 | sed "s#^#${PWD}/#"

/home/bbbco/2011-09-01-00-33-02.073-VirtualBox-2934.log

/home/bbbco/2011-09-10-09-49-57.004-VirtualBox-2716.log

/home/bbbco/cookies.txt

/home/bbbco/Desktop

/home/bbbco/Documents

/home/bbbco/Downloads

...

Show sample output | Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for file in * .*; do echo $PWD/$file; done
2011-12-16 13:42:07
User: marek158
Functions: echo file
Tags: echo ls
-8
Up
Down
list with full path

Also lists hidden files, current dir and topdir.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
for file in *; do echo $PWD/$file; done
2011-12-16 13:12:00
User: Velenux
Functions: echo file
Tags: echo ls
-6
Up
Down
list with full path
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -ad */
2011-12-10 17:08:07
User: tbekolay
Functions: ls
Tags: ls directory
3
Up
Down
ls only directories

Like normal ls, but only lists directories.

Can be used with -l to get more details (ls -lad */)

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l `whereis gcc`
2011-11-15 19:45:08
User: knathan54
Functions: ls
Tags: which ls zsh
0
Up
Down
Get the dir listing of an executable without knowing its location

whereis (1) - locate the binary, source, and manual page files for a command

Not actually better, just expanded a bit. The "whereis" command has the following output:

whereis gcc

gcc: /usr/bin/gcc /usr/lib/gcc /usr/bin/X11/gcc /usr/share/man/man1/gcc.1.gz

therefore the 'ls' error on first line, which could be eliminated with a little extra work.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l =gcc
2011-11-15 08:06:25
User: Seebi
Functions: ls
Tags: which ls zsh
1
Up
Down
Get the dir listing of an executable without knowing its location

this is the much easier zsh equivalent ...

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l `which gcc`
2011-11-14 01:28:34
User: bhinesley
Functions: ls
Tags: which ls
2
Up
Down
Get the dir listing of an executable without knowing its location
Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
fail () { ln -s /nonexistent 0_FAIL_${1}; }
2011-11-06 20:14:33
User: pipeliner
Functions: ln
Tags: ls color link fail
0
Up
Down
Mark a directory as one where something failed

If you use colored ls(1), the broken symbolic links significantly differ from regular files and directories in the ls listing. In my case it is bright red. 0 is for getting the first place in the list.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -1 $PATH*/* | xargs file | awk -F":" '!($2~/PDF document/){print $1}' |xargs rm -rf
2011-11-02 04:42:32
User: karuppasamy
Functions: awk file ls rm xargs
Tags: awk ls delete pdf rm
0
Up
Down
delete the files from the given directory except the PDF file
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
find . ! -name \*.md5 -exec 'md5sum "{}" > "{}".md5' \;
2011-10-26 21:54:48
User: ioggstream
Functions: find
Tags: ls grep md5sum for loop
5
Up
Down
create missing md5 for all files in directory

Just use find. No need to test file existence. On gnu find you can limit directory depth. Use "{}" to manage correctly files with spaces

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -lFart |tail -n1
2011-10-17 19:49:14
User: jambino
Functions: ls tail
Tags: tail pipe ls
-2
Up
Down
Show the single most recently modified file in a directory

List all files in a directory in reverse order by modified timestamp. When piped through tail the user will see the most recent file name.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
lsr() { find "${@:-.}" -print0 |sort -z |xargs -0 ls $LS_OPTIONS -dla; }
2011-08-15 03:10:58
User: h3xx
Functions: find ls sort xargs
Tags: sort find ls xargs function list
1
Up
Down
Sorted, recursive long file listing

Tells you everything you could ever want to know about all files and subdirectories. Great for package creators. Totally secure too.

On my Slackware box, this gets set upon login:

LS_OPTIONS='-F -b -T 0 --color=auto'

and

alias ls='/bin/ls $LS_OPTIONS'

which works great.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
ls -l | grep ^d | sed 's:.*\ ::g'
2011-08-08 12:36:28
User: bormarek
Functions: grep ls sed
Tags: bash sed ls grep
0
Up
Down
List only directories, one per line

nothing special

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
rm -R `ls | egrep -v 'dir1|dir2|file1'`
2011-08-07 08:34:17
User: killman
Functions: egrep rm
Tags: exclude ls rm
-1
Up
Down
Delete files and directories from current directory exept those specified
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate