All commands (14,184)

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. 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.

Share Your Commands


Check These Out

move contents of the current directory to the parent directory, then remove current directory.
Robust means of moving all files up by a directory. Will handle dot files, filenames containing spaces, and filenames with almost any printable characters. Will not handle filenames containing a single-quote (but if you are moving those, it's time to go yell at whoever created them in the first place).

Trick find -exec option to execute alias
An alias cannot be executed as command in a find -exec line. This form will trick the command line and let you do the job.

SVN Command line branch merge
This will merge all of the changes from {rev_num} to head on the branch to the current working directory

JSON processing with Python
Validates and pretty-prints the content fetched from the URL.

du and sort to find the biggest directories in defined filesystem
This command give a human readable result without messing up the sorting.

Create a directory and change into it at the same time
How often do you make a directory (or series of directories) and then change into it to do whatever? 99% of the time that is what I do. This BASH function 'md' will make the directory path then immediately change to the new directory. By using the 'mkdir -p' switch, the intermediate directories are created as well if they do not exist.

Convert (almost) any video file into webm format for online html5 streaming
If you're using the experimental vorbis encoder (homebrew version of libffmpeg)

Jump up to any directory above the current one
Usage: upto directory

Check all bash scripts in current dir for syntax errors
Check all bash scripts in current dir for syntax errors WITHOUT running them.

tar pipe to copy files, alternate to cp -Ra
uses tar to dump files from /orignl/path to /dst/dir. i find tar's out more readable than cp, and it doesn't mess with modified dates.


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: