All commands (14,187)

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

grab all commandlinefu shell functions into a single file, suitable for sourcing.
Much simpler but not as many features as the alternative.

Use find to get around Argument list too long problem
Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names.

Export OPML from Google Reader

Re-use the previous command output
The $(!!) will expand to the previous command output (by re-running the command), which becomes the parameter of the new command newcommand.

Processes by CPU usage

svn diff colorized
If colordiff utility installed, it is sometimes handy to call this command. Of course, you should create an alias for it. E.g. svndiff.

identify exported sonames in a path
This provides a list of shared object names (sonames) that are exported by a given tree. This is usually useful to make sure that a given required dependency (NEEDED entry) is present in a firmware image tree. The shorter (usable) version for it would be $ scanelf -RBSq -F "+S#f" But I used the verbose parameters in the command above, for explanation.

Change Gnome wallpaper
You can use this in a script which rotates wallpapers from a directory at each login.

list any Linux files without users or groups
suspicious/anomalous ownership may indicate system breach; should return no results

Prettify an XML file
Like `tidy`, `xmllint` can be used to prettify XML files. The --nsclean option is also useful to remove redundant namespaces.


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: