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

Get your external IP address if your machine has a DNS entry
Using DynDNS or a similar service not only allows access to your home machine from outside without needing to know what IP the ISP has assigned to it but it also comes in handy if you want to know your external IP address. The only purpose of the sed command is to remove the leading "host.na.me has address " part from the output. If you don't need to discard it you can simply use $ host $HOSTNAME

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line and connect local resources
The above command will open a Remote Desktop connection from command line, authenticate using default username and password (great for virtual machines; in the exampe above it's administrator:password), create a shared folder between your machine and the other machine and configure resolution to best fit your desktop (I don't like full screen because it make the desktop panels to disappear). The command will run in the background, and expect to receive parameters. You should enter hostname or IP address as a parameter to the command, and can also override the defaults parameters with your own.

convert several jpg into one pdf file
require ImageMagick and GhostScript paquet

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Check if a machine is online
PING parameters c 1 limits to 1 pinging attempt q makes the command quiet (or silent mode) /dev/null 2>&1 is to remove the display && echo ONLINE is executed if previous command is successful (return value 0) || echo OFFLINE is executed otherwise (return value of 1 if unreachable or 2 if you're offline yourself). I personally use this command as an alias with a predefined machine name but there are at least 2 improvements that may be done. Asking for the machine name or IP Escaping the output so that it displays ONLINE in green and OFFLINE in red (for instance).

tar+pbzip2 a dir

List all symbolic links in current directory
Many competing commands to do this, but since most people want a Long list with Human readable files sizes and want to see All files (including hidden (.*) files) this one wins on simplicity and usefulness. Plus grep is just as, if not more portable than sed or awk, and is more widely understood. :)

formatting number with comma
it is not work with Cygwin's bash3.X. Test in Linux. use printf "%'f" number while it is floating point number

Find Duplicate Files (based on MD5 hash) -- For Mac OS X
This works on Mac OS X using the `md5` command instead of `md5sum`, which works similarly, but has a different output format. Note that this only prints the name of the duplicates, not the original file. This is handy because you can add `| xargs rm` to the end of the command to delete all the duplicates while leaving the original.

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
random file from files in directory


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: