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

bulk dl files based on a pattern
-O switch creates local filename same as remote curl [][] -o #1#2 makes local files unique inserting sequence values into #x placeholders sequences can be alpha or numeric e.g [a-z] [1-25]

monitor a tail -f command with multiple processes
when using named pipes only one reader is given the output by default. Also, most commands piped to by grep use a buffer which save output until tail -f finishes, which is not convenient. Here, using a combination of tee, sub-processes and the --line-buffered switch in grep we can workaround the problem.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

sort monthwise
sort command can sort month-wise (first three letters of each month). See the sample output for clarification. Sorting Stable ? NO. Take note if that matters to you. Sample output suggests that sort performs unstable sorting (see the relative order of two 'feb' entries).

Rename files in batch

Create user add lines from partial passwd file
Handy if you are installing a new server or recovering an old one and you have a passwd file with the accounts you want to add to the server. If you edit the file so that only the accounts that you want to add are left this line will spit out the correct useradd lines. The uid, gecos and shell will be preserved.

Revert all modified files in an SVN repo

Find only *.doc and *xls files on Windows partition
When using regex - there is no need to use -o and 2nd regex.

Directory Tree
tree has lots of parms - man is your friend

Convert a script to one-liner
Opposite: Convert an one-liner to script: $ foo() { ; } ... $ typeset -f foo ... $ unset -f foo


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: