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).

Check command history, but avoid running it

Terminal - Check command history, but avoid running it
!whatever:p
2009-02-05 21:39:39
User: jonty
196
Up
Down
Check command history, but avoid running it

!whatever will search your command history and execute the first command that matches 'whatever'. If you don't feel safe doing this put :p on the end to print without executing. Recommended when running as superuser.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 2 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

not working on my ubuntu machine or mac.

Comment by cowholio4 223 weeks and 2 days ago

Pressing +r then start typing the command will show you live updates of the history as you type. You can also use the up and down arrows to find the one your looking for.

Comment by pkkid 223 weeks and 2 days ago

@cowholio4: i got it working with both ubuntu and os x; you did not actually type in

!whatever:p

did you?

Comment by p3k 223 weeks and 1 day ago

Works on Opensuse 11, very cool!

Comment by Williebee 223 weeks ago

looklike it works, but may be batter to cat .bash_history?

or I`d just not understand the true meaning of this thing

Comment by GreyCardinal 222 weeks and 5 days ago

Oh! understood!

ubuntu 8.10 -works

debian etch - no -:(

Comment by GreyCardinal 222 weeks and 4 days ago

@p3k

hahah.... thanks.

Still i prefer control + r

Comment by cowholio4 221 weeks and 6 days ago

I can only think that the :p means "just kidding about re-executing it" :)

Comment by Buzzcp 213 weeks and 6 days ago

ctrl+r works better and everywhere.

Comment by oringo 210 weeks and 5 days ago

... or you could just set histverify ("shopt -s histverify") and be done.

Comment by akg240 193 weeks and 3 days ago

On ubuntu also:

history|grep whatever

That will show every time in your history file the command has been called rather than just the last time.

Comment by magikid 175 weeks and 3 days ago

Agree with C-r

Comment by Erus 166 weeks and 2 days ago

use bash lusers! pkkid is right!

Comment by buzzy 159 weeks and 4 days ago

To those who say Ctrl-R works everwhere, try running Ctrl-R on csh/tcsh, or ksh, Ctrl-R only works on bash and Z shell. While !search:p works on many more, also it is more continent to type a simple command in than to use a shell feature, as you can use it in a string of commands.

Comment by Chartreuse 158 weeks ago

function hg(){ history | grep $1; }

Then "hg command" will print all previous commands

Comment by quincymd 153 weeks and 5 days ago

it works fine like this:

1. type

echo hello

then you have it in your history. now you can type:

!echo

and you get "echo hello" in your commandline with the cursor at the end, so you can edit it before you commit it or you press ^C to cancel

very useful!

Comment by rubo77 134 weeks and 4 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts