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.

World cup college
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

2010-03-18 - Top 10 commands explained
There's a great article by Peteris Krumins explaining the current top 10 commands: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/top-ten-one-liners-from-commandlinefu-explained/
2010-03-03 - Commandlinefu @ SXSW 2010
Am going to be at SXSW this year, in case you want to submit any CLI nuggets or suggestions to me in person. Ping me on the @codeinthehole Twitter account.
2009-09-12 - Email updates now available
You can now enable email updates to let you know each time you're command is commented on.
2009-07-11 - API and javascript blog widget now available
A simple API has been released, allowing commands to be retrieved in various formats. This also allows commands to be embedded on blogs/homepages.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Simple Comment an entire file

Terminal - Simple Comment an entire file
sed -i 's/^/#/' FILENAME
2009-09-11 14:13:47
User: flip387
Functions: sed
0
Up
Down
Simple Comment an entire file

With this simple sed command we can easily comment and entire file.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

no need the ending 'g'.

'g' means for all occurences in a line, the line starting can't be present more than once on a line.

correct command is either:

sed -i 's/^/#/1' FILENAME

or

sed -i 's/^/#/' FILENAME
Comment by mobidyc 50 weeks and 6 days ago

Ahh thanks for the update, I will go ahead adn fix this command.

Comment by flip387 50 weeks and 5 days ago

And here's a solution for systems without GNU sed:

echo "%s/^/#/^Jwq"|ex FILENAME

note that ^J is Ctrl-J, depending on shell settings you need to prefix it with Ctrl-Q or Ctrl-V when entering. I didn't use '

Comment by penpen 50 weeks and 5 days ago

seems as if I once again found a bug in this site :-| The dropped part of the sentence was that I did not use three less than symbols because that also does not work on most systems...

Comment by penpen 50 weeks and 5 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts