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

Bypass 1000 Entry limit of Active Directory with ldapsearch
That command bypass the entry limit specifing page results size, when the search arrive to the limit ldapsearch magically reiterate it from the last entry.

Check a directory of PNG files for errors
Useful for checking if a large number of PNG files was downloaded successfully by verifying the built-in CRC checksum. For incomplete files, the command will print: "00002309.png EOF while reading IDAT data ERROR: 00002309.png" The process is very fast; checking 21,000 files of 5MB in size took only five minutes on a 2011 Intel mobile dual-core.

Find 'foo' string inside files

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

find out how many days since given date
You can also do this for seconds, minutes, hours, etc... Can't use dates before the epoch, though.

convert ascii string to hex
just a bit simpler

Check if running in an X session
If you want to display a dialog (using xdialog/kdialog/zenity) you need to make sure that you have a valid X session. Checks for the existence of the DISPLAY variable.

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
No need to loop when we have `xargs`. The sed command filters out the first line of `show databases` output, which is always "Database".

grep processes list avoiding the grep itself
Trick to avoid the form: grep process | grep - v grep

Download a new release of a program that you already have very quickly
Zsync is an implementation of rsync over HTTP that allows updating of files from a remote Web server without requiring a full download. For example, if you already have a Debian alpha, beta or RC copy downloaded, zsync can just download the updated bits of the new release of the file from the server. This requires the distributor of the file to have created a zsync build control file (using zsyncmake).


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: