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

Import SQL into MySQL with a progress meter
This uses PV to monitor the progress of the MySQL import and displays it though Zenity. You could also do this pv ~/database.sql | mysql -u root -pPASSWORD -D database_name and get a display in the CLI that looks like this 2.19MB 0:00:06 [ 160kB/s] [> ] 5% ETA 0:01:40 My Nautalus script using this command is here http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post1253285.html#post1253285

Show the date of easter
ncal -e shows the date of Easter this year. ncal -e YYYY shows the date of Easter in a given year. ncal -o works the same way, but for Orthodox dates.

most used unix commands

Get the dir listing of an executable without knowing its location

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Search for files in rpm repositorys. (Mandriva linux)
Look for an rpm that supplies a specific file that you don't yet have installed. extremely useful when you need something and don't know where it is.. or what its called. note: uses grep like syntax.

List manually installed packages (excluding Essentials)

HOME USE ONLY: Get rid of annoying Polkit password prompts
Although the need to type a password to make certain changes to the system may make perfect sense in a business or educational environment, it makes absolutely zero sense to the home user. So, if you’re at home and would rather get work done than be annoyed by what is essentially Linux’s UAC, then this command is for you.

convert single digit to double digits
Uses 'rename' to pad zeros in front of first existing number in each filename. The "--" is not required, but it will prevent errors on filenames which start with "-". You can change the "2d" to any number you want, equaling the total numeric output: aka, 4d = ????, 8d = ????????, etc. I setup a handful of handy functions to this effect (because I couldn't figure out how to insert a var for the value) in the form of 'padnum?', such as: padnum5 () { /usr/bin/rename 's/\d+/sprintf("%05d",$&)/e' -- $@ } Which would change a file "foo-1.txt" to "foo-00001.txt"

Find the package that installed a command


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: