Commands by mindfuckup (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

Binary difference of two files
Upload/download newer version of any file with less size and high speed. To remake the new file use $bspatch

Drop all tables from a database, without deleting it
Uses two comands, requieres mysqldump, but works as expected.

Check if network cable is plugged in and working correctly
with 'mii-tool -w eth0' you can watch the interface for changes of the link status

aptitude easter eggs
this is a reference to Antoine de St. Exupery's "The Little Prince"

rsync over ssh via non-default ssh port
tested on cygwin and Fedora 9 . good to remember for those jobs where you cannot set a site-specific connect option in your ~/.ssh/config file.

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command

IFS - use entire lines in your for cycles
When you use a "for" construct, it cycles on every word. If you want to cycle on a line-by-line basis (and, well, you can't use xargs -n1 :D), you can set the IFS variable to .

Download YouTube Videos using wget and youtube-dl and just using the video link
in place of "output-filename.mp4" put the name you want the file to be named with. in place of "youtube-video-link" put the link of the Video page eg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AclA-7YntvE in place of "format-number" put the number of the file format you would like How to get the "format-number" to get format number type in below command before running this command $ youtube-dl -F "youtube-video-link" and it will list all the available formats with the format number, like to download in 360p mp4 use the number "18" To automatically let it fetch the best quality available just remove the -f "format-number" and you are good to go.

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"

Search manpages for a keyword
Search manpages for a keyword. Very useful when you don't know where to find the information.

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: