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

Create a tar archive with all files of a certain type found in present dir and subdirs
Note: the tar archive must not exist in order to create it. If exists it will only be updated and no already existent files in present search will still remain in the tar archive. The update option has to be used instead of create because the command tar may be executed more than once depending on the number of arguments that find throws. You can see maximum number of arguments with 'getconf ARG_MAX'

Create and replay macros in vim
You can record, then replay a series of keystrokes in vim. In command mode 'q', then a letter [a-zA-Z] starts macro recording mode. Enter a series of vim commands. When done, enter command mode again, and press 'q' to stop recording. To replay, enter command mode, then press @{letter}

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Creates a SSHFS volume on MacOS X (better used as an alias). Needs FuseFS and SSHFS (obvioulsly).
To make it even more practical, make sure you can login to the ssh server using a keypair.

Remove all but One
$ rm-but() { ls -Q | grep -v "$1" | xargs rm -r ; } Add this to your .bashrc file. Then whenever you need to remove all files/directories but one from present working directory. Run: $ rm-but Notes: 1. This doesn't affect the hidden files. 2. Argument is actually as string. And all files/directories having this string in there name are left untouched.

archive all files containing local changes (svn)
Create a tgz archive of all the files containing local changes relative to a subversion repository. Add the '-q' option to only include files under version control: $svn st -q | cut -c 8- | sed 's/^/\"/;s/$/\"/' | xargs tar -czvf ../backup.tgz Useful if you are not able to commit yet but want to create a quick backup of your work. Of course if you find yourself needing this it's probably a sign you should be using a branch, patches or distributed version control (git, mercurial, etc..)

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

sed edit-in-place using -a option instead of -i option (no tmp file created)
does the -i option open a tmp file? this method does not.

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

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: