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 using tail

Commands using tail from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using tail - 208 results
cat -n $file | tail -n 100 && head -n number-of-lines-you-want-to-keep > newfile
2009-02-15 01:02:10
User: bbelt16ag
Functions: cat head tail
-1
Up
Down
removing those pesky malformed lines at the end of a text file..

tells you the number of lines in said file, and then tail the last 100 lines ( or how many are messed up) then u take the total amount of lines and then subract the 100 or so lines u DONT WANT, then do a head -n $new_number and then redirect it to new file.db

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -f /var/log/messages
2009-02-12 19:30:33
User: nicdev
Functions: tail
-3
Up
Down
View new log messages in real time

Use this command to see logs update in real time

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
head -1000 < lines.txt | tail -1
2009-02-08 06:41:20
User: wbx
Functions: head tail
-2
Up
Down
get line#1000 from text.
Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
alias nsl 'netstat -f inet | grep -v CLOSE_WAIT | cut -c-6,21-94 | tail +2'
2009-02-07 18:54:12
User: mnikhil
Functions: alias cut grep tail
3
Up
Down
show all programs connected or listening on a network port

Use the aliased command 'nsl'

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
view `ls -1 access_log.* | tail -n 1`
2009-02-06 18:38:25
User: jimjmarion
Functions: tail
0
Up
Down
View latest apache access log

This command opens the latest, most current rotating apache access log for visual analysis and inspection. Run this command from the apache log directory. For error logs, replace access_log with error_log.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -f <filename> | grep -C <# of lines to show above and below> <text>
2009-02-06 17:19:01
User: manalang
Functions: grep tail
4
Up
Down
Live filter a log file using grep and show x# of lines above and below
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
(> errors.log) && tail -f !^
2009-02-03 16:08:19
User: root
Functions: tail
2
Up
Down
Flush and then immediately start watching a file

This is useful for keeping an eye on an error log while developing. The !^ pulls the first arg from the previous command (which needs to be run in a sub-shell for this shortcut to work).

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
tail -10000 access_log | awk '{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
2009-01-25 21:01:52
User: root
Functions: awk sort tail uniq
19
Up
Down
Analyse an Apache access log for the most common IP addresses

This uses awk to grab the IP address from each request and then sorts and summarises the top 10.

Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate