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

Use vim automation to create a colorized html file

download newest adminer and rename to it's version accordingly
If the version already downloaded. it will not download again

List bash functions defined in .bash_profile or .bashrc
If you issue the "set" command, you'll see a list of variables and functions. This command displays just those functions' names.

Download entire commandlinefu archive to single file
'jot' does not come with most *nix distros, so we need to use seq to make it work. This version tested good on Fedora 11.

make, or run a script, everytime a file in a directory is modified
Uses inotifywait from inotify-tools ( http://wiki.github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/ ), that is compatible only with linux. Usefull when you work with files that have to be compiled.. latex, haml, c..

Configuring proxy client on terminal without leaving password on screen or in bash_history
Prompts the user for username and password, that are then exported to http_proxy for use by wget, yum etc Default user, webproxy and port are used. Using this script prevent the cleartext user and pass being in your bash_history and on-screen

ThePirateBay.org torrent search
usage: tpb searchterm example: tpb the matrix trilogy This searches for torrents from thepiratebay and displays the top results in reverse order, so the 1st result is at the bottom instead of the top -- which is better for command line users

simplest calculator

Delete empty directories recursively

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password
The improvement of this command over Strawp's original alternative is that you can specify the size of the words, in this particular case words between 3 and 5 character's long. It also excludes words that contain apostrophes, if you'd rather keep those words simply substitue [^'] for .


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: