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

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
I used only shuf command.

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

cp the file
Copy the file with the given .extension at the source file's location. Eliminates the typing of long paths again and again.

Get all files of particular type (say, PDF) listed on some wegpage (say, example.com)
This example command fetches 'example.com' webpage and then fetches+saves all PDF files listed (linked to) on that webpage. [*Note: of course there are no PDFs on example.com. This is just an example]

Merge several pdf files into a single file

Check if it's your binary birthday!
Print out your age in days in binary. Today's my binary birthday, I'm 2^14 days old :-) . This command does bash arithmatic $(( )) on two dates: Today: $(date +%s) Date of birth: $(date +%s -d YYYY-MM-DD) The dates are expressed as the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (Jan 1970), so we devide the difference by 86400 (seconds per day). . Finally we pipe "obase=2; DAYS-OLD" into bc to convert to binary. (obase == output base)

Check every URL redirect (HTTP status codes 301/302) with curl
curl -sLkIv --stderr - https://t.co/2rQjHfptZ8 -s: silences the output when piped to a different command -L: follow every redirect -k: ignores certificate errors -I: just request the headers -v: be verbose --stderr - : redirect stderr to stdout https://t.co/2rQjHfptZ8: URL to check for redirects piped to grep -i location: -i: grep target text ignoring case location: : greps every string containing "location:" piped to awk {'print $3'} prints the third column in every string piped to sed '/^$/d' removes blank lines

list any Linux files without users or groups
suspicious/anomalous ownership may indicate system breach; should return no results

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy


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: