Commands by Miles (1)

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

command! -nargs=1 Vs vs <args>
Because entering ':' requires that you press shift, sometimes common command-line / mini-buffer commands will be capitalized by accident.

coloured tail
tail with coloured output with the help of perl - need more colours? here is a colour table: http://www.tuxify.de/?p=23

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.

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)

Remove today's installed packages

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

List files by quoting or escaping special characters.
Tested and works on Linux.

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

Backup your OpenWRT config (only the config, not the whole system)
You only have to fill in your administrative account and password, and the router FQDN! I recommand to execute this command not over the internet, because there is no encryption (the username and password will be transmitted in plaintext!)


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: