commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.
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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
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,…):
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While I love gpg and truecrypt there's some times when you just want to edit a file and not worry about keys or having to deal needing extra software on hand. Thus, you can use vim's encrypted file format.
For more info on vim's encrypted files visit: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/editing.html#encryption
This command will copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local one.
Ensure you are in the local directory you want to populate with the remote files before running the command.
To copy a directory and it's contents, you could:
ssh user@host "(cd /path/to/a/directory ; tar cvf - ./targetdir)" | tar xvf -
This is especially useful on *nix'es that don't have 'scp' installed by default.
If you have lots of remote hosts sitting "behind" an ssh proxy host, then there is a special-case use of "rsynch" that allows one to easily copy directories and files across the ssh proxy host, without having to do two explicit copies: the '-e' option allows for a replacement "rsh" command. We use this option to specify an "ssh" tunnel command, with the '-A' option that causes authentication agent requests to be forwarded back to the local host. If you have ssh set up correctly, the above command can be done without any passwords being entered.
Many Mac OS X programs, especially those in Microsoft:Office, create ASCII files with lines terminated by CRs (carriage returns). Most Unix programs expect lines separated by NLs (newlines). This little command makes it trivial to convert them.
Coming back to a project directory after sometime elsewhere?
Need to know what the most recently modified files are?
This little function "t" is one of my most frequent commands.
I have a tcsh alias for it also:
alias t 'ls -ltch \!* | head -20'
Ever wanted to find the most recently modified files, but couldn't remember exactly where they were in a project directory with many subdirectories? The "find" command, using a combination of "-mtime -N" and "-depth -D" can be used to find those files. If your directory structure isn't very deep, just omit the "-depth -D", but if your directory structure is very deep, then you can limit the depth of the traversal using "-depth -D", where "D" is the maximum number of directory levels to descend.