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

Quickest way to sort/display # of occurences

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully
Executes the previously-run command constantly until it returns 0 (success). Put a

Continually monitor things
You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle.

Debian: Mark all dependent packages as manualy installed.
Debian: Mark all dependent packages as manually installed. So they are not automatically removed if you remove some meta package - like gnome-desktop-environment for example.

Command line calculator

Kill all processes belonging to a user

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Greets the user appropriately

Get the IP address of a machine. Just the IP, no junk.
Why use many different utilities all piped together, when you only need two?

Mount a temporary ram partition
Makes a partition in ram which is useful if you need a temporary working space as read/write access is fast. Be aware that anything saved in this partition will be gone after your computer is turned off.


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: