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 xargs

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 xargs

Terminal - Commands using xargs - 522 results

N="filepath" ; P=/proc/$(lsof +L1 | grep "$N" | awk '{print $2}')/fd ; ls -l $P | sed -rn "/$N/s/.*([0-9]+) ->.*/\1/p" | xargs -I_ cat $P/_ > "$N"

2009-02-21 02:31:24

User: laburu

Functions: awk cat grep ls sed xargs

Up
Down

restore the contents of a deleted file for which a descriptor is still available

Note that the file at the given path will have the contents of the (still) deleted file, but it is a new file with a new node number; in other words, this restores the data, but it does not actually "undelete" the old file.

I posted a function declaration encapsulating this functionality to http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7yx6f/how_to_undelete_any_open_deleted_file_in_linux/c07sqwe (please excuse the crap formatting).

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

ps auxwww | grep outofcontrolprocess | awk '{print $9}' | xargs kill -9

2009-02-20 21:49:38

User: fpater

Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs

-7

Up
Down

kill all instances of an annoying or endless, thread-spawning process

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

find . -type d -execdir du -sh '{}' ';' | grep -E "[0-9]+K" | sed 's/^[0-9\.]\+K[\t ]\+//' | tr "\n" "\0" | xargs -0 rm -rf

2009-02-20 19:44:49

User: jdunn

Functions: du find grep rm sed tr xargs

Up
Down

Remove all directories less than 1 MB in size in or below current directory

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

ps aux | grep -i firefox | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs -t -i kill -9 {}

2009-02-19 18:50:00

User: blackdude

Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs

-7

Up
Down

This is a nice way to kill processes.. the example below is for firefox!!! substitute firefox for whatever the process name is...

This is a nice way to kill processes.. the example here is for firefox!!! substitute firefox for whatever the process name is...

ps -o ppid= <given pid> | xargs ps -p

2009-02-19 16:12:49

User: dizzgo

Functions: ps xargs

Up
Down

get some information about the parent process from a given process

svn st | grep ^\? | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn add

2009-02-19 11:58:44

User: dealforest

Functions: awk grep xargs

Up
Down

Add new file under svn version control.

convenience.

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

find . -name .svn | xargs rm -rf

2009-02-19 02:05:27

User: avi4now

Functions: find rm xargs

-2

Up
Down

Recursively delete .svn folders

Found here: http://xentek.net/xentek/315/recursively-delete-svn-folders/

This is fast and efficient because rm is only run once.

Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

tar ztf tar-lacking-subdirectory.tar.gz | xargs rm

2009-02-19 00:34:09

User: mulad

Functions: tar xargs

Up
Down

Clean up after a poorly-formed tar file

These days, most software distributed in tar files will just contain a directory at the top level, but some tar files don't have this and can leave you with a mess of files in the current folder if you blindly execute

tar zxvf something.tar.gz

This command can help you clean up after such a mistake. However, note that this has the potential to do bad things if someone has been *really* nasty with filenames.

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

ps -ef | grep $USERNAME | awk {'print $2'} | xargs kill [-9]

2009-02-17 20:35:35

User: TheNomad

Functions: awk grep kill ps xargs

Up
Down

Kill all processes belonging to a user

This is a 'killall' command equivalent where it is not available.

Prior to executing it, set the environment variable USERNAME to the username, whose processes you want to kill or replace the username with the $USERNAME on the command above.

Side effect: If any processes from other users, are running with a parameter of $USERNAME, they will be killed as well (assuming you are running this as root user)

[-9] in square brackets at the end of the command is optional and strongly suggested to be your last resort. I do not like to use it as the killed process leaves a lot of mess behind.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

find apps/ -name "*.svn-base" -prune -o -print -name "*.php" | xargs grep -E 'new .+Form\('

2009-02-17 14:56:01

User: ubermuda

Functions: find grep xargs

-1

Up
Down

find forms in a symfony 1.2 project

finds all forms instanciated into a symfony project, pruning svn files.

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

ls -1 /bin | xargs -l1 whatis 2>/dev/null | grep -v "nothing appropriate"

2009-02-17 14:46:01

User: stinger

Functions: grep ls whatis xargs

Up
Down

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs

Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

find ~/bin/ -name "*sh" -print0 | xargs -0t tar -zcvf foofile.tar.gz

2009-02-17 08:48:34

User: lhb

Functions: find tar xargs

Up
Down

Compress files found with find

tar options may change ;)

c to compress into a tar file, z for gzip (j for bzip) man tar

-print0 and -0t are usefull for names with spaces, \, etc.

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

find /directory/to/search/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "findtext"

2009-02-17 07:16:32

User: dingobytes

Functions: find grep xargs

Up
Down

find text in a file

this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

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

find path/to/folder/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -n 1 md5sum | awk '{print $1}' | sort | md5sum | awk '{print $1}'

2009-02-16 19:39:37

User: mcover

Functions: awk find md5sum sort xargs

-2

Up
Down

Calculates fake folder checksum based on folder's files' md5sums

For quick validation of folder's file-contents (structure not taken into account) - I use it mostly to check if two folders' contents are the same.

df / | awk '{print $1}' | grep dev | xargs tune2fs -l | grep create

2009-02-16 18:45:03

User: Kaio

Functions: awk df grep tune2fs xargs

Up
Down

Check the age of the filesystem

Very useful set of commands to know when your file system was created.

find . -name "*.jar" | xargs -tn1 jar tvf | grep --color "SearchTerm"

2009-02-16 17:18:36

User: unixmonkey1092

Functions: find grep xargs

Up
Down

Search inside a folder of jar/zip files

Great for finding which jar some pesky class is hiding in!

find . -type f -exec grep -l pattern {} \; | xargs vi +/pattern

2009-02-16 08:39:39

User: unixmonkey982

Functions: find grep vi xargs

Up
Down

find all files containing a pattern, open them using vi and place cursor to the first match, use 'n' and ':n' to navigate

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

xprop | awk '/PID/ {print $3}' | xargs ps h -o pid,cmd

2009-02-16 07:55:19

User: jackhab

Functions: awk ps xargs

Tags: Process Management windows process GUI

Up
Down

Click on a GUI window and show its process ID and command used to run the process

This command is useful when you want to know what process is responsible for a certain GUI application and what command you need to issue to launch it in terminal.

find . -type f -exec grep -l XXX {} \;|tee /tmp/fileschanged|xargs perl -pi.bak -e 's/XXX/YYY/g'

2009-02-16 02:55:23

User: drossman

Functions: find grep perl tee xargs

Up
Down

Change string in many files at once and more.

Find all files that contain string XXX in them, change the string from XXX to YYY, make a backup copy of the file and save a list of files changed in /tmp/fileschanged.

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

find "$DIR" -regex "$FILENAME" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i _`date "+%y%m%d%H%M%S"` -E "s/$TEXT1/$TEXT2/g"

2009-02-15 09:36:51

User: unixmonkey813

Functions: find sed xargs

Up
Down

Search specified $TEXT1 and Replace that by specified arg ($TEXT2)

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

find . -type f -print | xargs grep foo

2009-02-13 12:22:53

User: syndrael

Functions: find grep xargs

Up
Down

Find 'foo' string inside files

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

find ./backup -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum > /checksums_backup.md5

2009-02-12 19:39:12

User: hooobs

Functions: find md5sum xargs

Up
Down

recurisvely md5 all files in a tree

Found this little gem here: http://info.michael-simons.eu/2008/10/25/recursively-md5sum-all-files-in-a-directory-tree/

Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

svn st | grep /main/java | awk '{print $2}' | xargs echo | xargs svn ci -m "my comment here"

2009-02-11 16:31:05

User: Antoine

Functions: awk echo grep xargs

-2

Up
Down

Commit all the changes in your java code

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

svn st | grep "^\?" | awk "{print \$2}" | xargs rm -rf

2009-02-10 21:15:23

User: l33tminion

Functions: awk grep rm xargs

Up
Down

delete unversioned files in a checkout from svn

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

find . -name Root -print | xargs rm -f

2009-02-10 15:28:24

User: JoseRijo

Functions: find rm xargs

Up
Down

Remove CVS root files under current directory

Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate

‹ First < 18 19 20 21 >