Commands by davidwhthomas (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

remove oprhan package on debian based system

Clone current directory into /destination verbosely
Copy every file from current directory to destination preserving modification time.

Monitor a file with tail with timestamps added
This is useful when watching a log file that does not contain timestamps itself. If the file already has content when starting the command, the first lines will have the "wrong" timestamp when the command was started and not when the lines were originally written.

Sync MySQL Servers via secure SSH-tunnel
I wanted to keep a backup of my company database server on my local homeserver. After I found maatkit to sync databases, everything except security seemed fine. SSH takes care of that part.

Update twitter via curl
Doesn't require password (asks for it instead)

Google URL shortener
(1) required: python-googl ( install by: pip install python-googl ) (2) get from google API console https://code.google.com/apis/console/

Print a cron formatted time for 2 minutes in the future (for crontab testing)
Another function to stick into your .bashrc This spits out the time two minutes in the future, but already formatted for pasting into your crontab file for testing without any thought required on your part. Frequently things don't work the way you expect inside a crontab job, and you probably want to find out now that your $PATH is completely different inside of cron or other global variables aren't defined. So this will generate a date you can use for testing now, and then later you can change it to run at 5:37 am on a Sunday evening.

Deleting / Ignoring lines from the top of a file
Output lines starting at line 2.

Go to directory or creat it and go to
For use in scripts this command is very usefull

capture mysql queries sent to server


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: