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

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:

» all commands
» commands with 3 up-votes (commandlinefu3)
» commands with 10 up-votes (commandlinefu10)
» commands using ls

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

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using ls

Terminal - Commands using ls - 408 results

ls -lhR | grep -e "total\|:$"

2013-01-22 04:58:51

User: Sebasg

Functions: grep ls

Tags: ls grep

Up
Down

List directories recursively showing its sizes using only ls and grep

ls -lhR

Lists everithing using -l "long listing format" wich includes the space used by the folder. Displays it in -h "human readable form" (i.e. 2.2G, 32K), and -R recurses subfolders.

grep -e using a regex, show lines containing the word "total" or a ":" at the end of the line (those with the name of the folder) only.

ls | wc -l

2013-01-22 03:35:35

User: Sebasg

Functions: ls wc

-3

Up
Down

Count all files in a directory

ls -1 shows one file per line (update: -1 was not really needed)

wc -l counts the lines received from the previous command

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ | grep '/sda$' | grep -o 'ata[^ ]*'

2013-01-16 17:28:11

User: michelsberg

Functions: grep ls

Tags: ls grep drive

Up
Down

Get the /dev/disk/by-id fragment for a physical drive

Substitute for #11720

Can probably be even shorter and easier.

man ls | egrep "^([A-Z]| [A-Z])"

2013-01-09 17:12:03

User: bartonski

Functions: egrep ls man

Up
Down

Show sections of a man page.

Uses the formatting of a man page to show an outline of its headers and sub-headers.

ls -l /dev/disk/by-id | egrep ata-.*`hdparm -i /dev/sda | grep SerialNo | sed 's/.*SerialNo=//' | tr -d "\n"`.*sda$ | sed -e 's/.*ata-/ata-/' -e 's|[ ].*||' | tr -d "\n"

2013-01-07 10:20:25

User: wizonesolutions

Functions: egrep grep ls sed tr

Tags: Ubuntu

-1

Up
Down

Get the /dev/disk/by-id fragment for a physical drive

This was tested on Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise) LTS Server. It returns the name of the symlink within /dev/disk/by-id for the physical drive you specify. Change /dev/sda to the one you want, and replace ata- with scsi- or the appropriate type for your drive.

I used this to pre-configure grub-pc during a non-interactive install because I had to tell it which disk to install grub on, and physical disks don't have a UUID such as that blkid provides.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -lSr

2012-12-14 14:39:00

User: unixmonkey44306

Functions: ls

Tags: ls

Up
Down

ls sort by human readable size (redhat)

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -l !(*.part)

2012-12-07 23:07:53

User: quacky

Functions: ls

Up
Down

list files other than, those, where you know, part of the name (e.g. file extension)

works nice if you're only interested in files that are completed downloading from a torrent

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -altr | grep ^d

2012-11-28 17:02:11

User: RedFox

Functions: grep ls

Up
Down

ls -altr | grep ^d

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

for I in $(find . -depth -type d -not -path "*/.svn*" -print) ; do N="$(ls -1A ${I} | wc -l)"; if [[ "${N}" -eq 0 || "${N}" -eq 1 && -n $(ls -1A | grep .svn) ]] ; then svn rm --force "${I}"; fi ; done

2012-11-26 23:53:45

User: olekhy

Functions: find grep ls rm

Up
Down

Deleting directory recurcive. Directories will be deleled when empty or contains only .svn subdirectory

svn must be 1.7

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find / -xdev $ -perm -4000 $ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -l

2012-11-16 01:11:53

User: anhpht

Functions: find ls xargs

-2

Up
Down

Find all files with setuid bit

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls /var/log/sa/sa[0-9]*|xargs -I '{}' sar -u -f {}|awk '/^[0-9]/&&!/^12:00:01|RESTART|CPU/{print "%user: "$4" %system: "$6" %iowait: "$7" %nice: "$5" %idle: "$9}'|sort -nk10|head

2012-10-25 18:27:47

User: omatictost

Functions: awk ls sort xargs

Up
Down

SAR - List top CPU usage spikes over the last month using sar.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls /var/log/sa/sa[0-9]*|xargs -I '{}' sar -q -f {}| awk '/Average/'|awk '{runq+=$2;plist+=$3}END{print "average runq-sz:",runq/NR; print "average plist-sz: "plist/NR}'

2012-10-25 17:04:48

User: omatictost

Functions: awk ls xargs

Up
Down

SAR - Get the monthly queue length average using sar -q for both the runq-sz and plist-sz.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls|wc -l

2012-10-08 07:16:58

User: ibi0tux

Functions: ls wc

Tags: wc

Up
Down

Count number of files in a directory

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls /dev/disk* | xargs -n 1 -t sudo zdb -l | grep GPTE_

2012-10-06 20:19:45

User: grahamperrin

Functions: grep ls sudo xargs

Tags: partition zfs darwin uuid zevo

Up
Down

Show the UUID of a filesystem or partition

Show the UUID-based alternate device names of ZEVO-related partitions on Darwin/OS X. Adapted from the lines by dbrady at http://zevo.getgreenbytes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=700#p700 and following the disk device naming scheme at http://zevo.getgreenbytes.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Site.DiskDeviceNames

cd () { command cd $1 && ls ; }

2012-09-27 08:49:07

User: olopopo

Functions: cd command ls

Up
Down

Changes dir to $1 and executes ls. As simple as useful

ls -l | grep "\->"

2012-09-20 12:48:36

User: joernfranz

Functions: grep ls

Tags: readlink

Up
Down

List all symbolic links in current directory

Pretty lame to rely on grep and "\->"? Maybe. But it works ;)

ls -l /proc/*/fd/* | grep 'deleted'| grep "\/proc.*\file-name-part"

2012-09-13 09:54:16

User: totti

Functions: grep ls

Tags: ls recovery file proc deleted

Up
Down

Find removed files still in use via /proc

Accidentally deleted some file while used by a program ? (Eg: a song)

Use this command to find the file handle and recover using

cp /proc/pid/fd/filehandle /new/recoverd-file.ext

ls -rt | tail -n 1

2012-09-06 07:07:35

User: m0rf

Functions: ls tail

Up
Down

Find latest file in a directory

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ln -s /base/* /target && ls -l /target

2012-08-22 11:27:40

User: mattcen

Functions: ln ls

Up
Down

Symlink all files from a base directory to a target directory

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

wget --no-use-server-timestamps $(curl $(curl http://wallbase.cc/random/23/eqeq/1920x1080/0/100/20 | grep 'wallpaper/' | awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | head -n1) | grep -A4 bigwall | grep img | awk -F'"' '{print $2}'); feh --bg-center $(ls -1t | head -n1)

2012-08-14 22:06:27

User: yosh

Functions: awk grep head ls wget

Up
Down

Random (sfw, 1920x1080) wallpaper from wallbase.cc

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

alias ls='if [[ -f .hidden ]]; then while read l; do opts+=(--hide="$l"); done < .hidden; fi; ls --color=auto "${opts[@]}"'

2012-08-12 13:10:23

User: expelledboy

Functions: alias ls read

Tags: hidden ls alias

Up
Down

Hide files in ls, by adding support for .hidden files!

Sometimes I would like to see hidden files, prefix with a period, but some files or folders I never want to see (and really wish I could just remove all together).

ls | grep -Ze ".*rar" | xargs -d '\n' -I {} mv {} backup-folder

2012-08-06 09:07:03

User: crisboot

Functions: grep ls mv xargs

Up
Down

Using Grep & Xargs to clean folders

In the example suppose we want to move all *.rar files in the current folder to a backupfolder

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -il; find * $ -type d -prune $ -o -inum <NUM> -exec rm -i {} \;

2012-08-04 00:22:33

User: yingw

Functions: find ls rm

Up
Down

Remove / delete file with ? or special characters in filename

Code to delete file with gremlins/special characters/unicode in file name.

Use ls -i to find the INODE number corresponding to the file and then delete it using that find statement.

detailed here:

http://www.arsc.edu/arsc/support/howtos/nonprintingchars/

find . -type f -exec ls -l --full-time {} + | sort -k 6,7

2012-08-03 22:22:51

User: quadcore

Functions: find ls sort

Tags: sort find ls

Up
Down

Sort files in multiple directories by date

This sorts files in multiple directories by their modification date. Note that sorting is done at the end using "sort", instead of using the "-ltr" options to "ls". This ensures correct results when sorting a large number of files, in which case "find" will call "ls" multiple times.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find . -type f -exec ls -shS {} + | head -10

2012-07-28 17:21:46

User: erichamion

Functions: find head ls

Tags: sort find GNU find file size

Up
Down

Find biggest 10 files in current and subdirectories and sort by file size

This requires a version of GNU find that supports the -exec {} + action, but it seems more straightforward than the versions already posted.

< 1 2 3 4 > Last ›