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

Remove comments and empty lines from a conf file
Some conf file are very long (squid.conf) This command help to read it.

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

Completely wipe all data on your Synology NAS and reinstall DSM. (BE CAREFUL)

Combine all .mpeg files in current directory into one big one.
Good old cat & output redirection. Using this method you can combine all kinds of things - even mpeg files. My video camera makes a series of .mpeg files that are broken into 4gb chunks. Using this command I can easily join them together. Even better, combined with the cp command the files can be copied and joined in one step.

Convert all old SVN repositories in one directory to new format

Merge video files together using mencoder (part of mplayer)
Using mplayer's mencoder, you can merge video files together. '-oac' specifies the audio encoding (here copy, to just copy and not compress) '-ovc' specifies the video encoding (same thing).

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Find out if a module is installed in perl
Shows the path if the module is installed or exit quietly (to simply avoid the 'No documentation found' msg).

Simple Video Surveillance by email
This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com"

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!


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: