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

List all installed Debian packages
Should work on all systems that use dpkg and APT package management.

faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Redefine the cd command's behavior
Often, the very next command after the cd command is 'ls', so why not combine them?. Tested on a Red Hat derivative and Mac OS X Leopard Update: changed ${1:-$HOME} to "${@:-$HOME}" to accomodate directories with spaces in the names

convert png into jpg using imagemagick

split a multi-page PDF into separate files
Have to do this once per output file, because if device is 'pdfwrite', even if 'gs' sees '%d' in the OutputFile it still only creates one single output file. Embed it into a simple shell script if you want to split a document out into one file for every page.

grep tab chars
mixing tabs and spaces for indentation in python would confuse the python interpreter, to avoid that, check if the file has any tab based indentation. "^V" => denotes press control + v and press tab within quotes. $ cat improper_indent.py class Tux(object): print "Hello world.." $ grep " " improper_indent.py print "Hello world.."

List only locally modified files with CVS

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)


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: