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My favorite command line one-liners (from Linux Comand Library) 🤓

Yeah..., so at some point, I did spend half a day going over this list, but hey at least I wrote down my favorites. Sharing here.

Written by Eva Dee on (about a 3 minute read).

🔗 The list originally from here.

List directories only:

  • ls -d */

Quickly rename a file - one day, this will be me! 😎:

  • mv filename.{old,new}

Create a quick back-up copy of a file:

  • cp file.txt{,.bak}

Delete all files in a folder that don't match a certain file extension:

  • rm !(*.foo|*.bar|*.baz)

Remove all but one specific file 💪:

  • rm -f !(survivior.txt)

Convert filenames in current directory to lowercase:

  • rename 'y/A-Z/a-z/' *

Remove all spaces from all files in current the folder (super useful!):

  • rename 's/ //g' *

Diff two unsorted files without creating temporary files:

  • diff <(sort file1) <(sort file2)

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command. I've never really had the use for this one, but I dream of a day when I'll be writing bash scipts...

  • ctrl+x + e

List of commands you use most often (there's also an oh-my-zsh command that does the same, but I just couldn't find it... 🤔):

  • history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
3390 git
1179 g # alias for git
548 cd
333 go # git alias for checkout
321 j # alias for autojump
295 touch
270 npm
215 yarn
209 code # vscode
151 kill # oopsie lots of 🔪

Quick access to the ascii table (specifically, the decimal set 👍):

  • man ascii

Show File System Hierarchy:

  • man hier

Create a pdf version of a manpage:

  • man -t manpage | ps2pdf - filename.pdf Maybe useful 🤷‍♀️?

Show apps that use internet connection at the moment:

  • lsof -P -i -n

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (untested 😅):

  • gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=OUTPUT.pdf -c .setpdfwrite -f INPUT.pdf

Get the biggest files/folders for the current directory:

  • du -s * | sort -n | tail

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted:

  • du -cs * .[^\.]* | sort -n

Remind yourself to leave in 15 minutes (note: To get rid of leave you should either log off or use kill -s KILL 😬):

  • leave +15

Download all images from a site:

  • wget -r -l1 --no-parent -nH -nd -P/tmp -A".gif,.jpg" http://example.com/images

Save command output to an image:

  • ifconfig | convert label:@- ip.png

Easy and fast access to often executed commands that are very long and complex by using labels:

  • some_very_long_and_complex_command # label