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

count match string lines from file(s)

set history file length
set how many commands to keep in history Default is 500 Saved in /home/$USER/.bash_history Add this to /home/$USER/.bashrc HISTFILESIZE=1000000000 HISTSIZE=1000000

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

Recursively scan directories for mp3s and pass them to mplayer
The command first deletes any old playlist calles playlist.tmp under /tmp. After that it recursively searches all direcotries under ~/mp3 and stores the result in /tmp/playlist.tmp. After havin created the playlist, the command will execute mplayer which will shuffle through the playlist. This command is aliased to m is aliased to `rm -rf /tmp/playlist.tmp && find ~/mp3 -name *.mp3 > /tmp/playlist.tmp && mplayer -playlist /tmp/playlist.tmp -shuffle -loop 0 | grep Playing' in my ~/.bashrc.

Stream the latest offering from your fave netcasts/podcasts
This is a quick line to stream in the latest offerings of your favorite netcasts/podcasts. You will need to have a file named netcast.txt in the directory you run this from. This file should have one and only one of your netcast's/podcst's url per line. When run the line grabs the offering on the top of the netcast/podcast stack and end it over , quietly, to vlc. Since I move around computers during the day I wanted an easy way to listen to my daily dose of news and such without having to worry about downloading to whatever machine I am on. This is just a quick grab and stream of whats current. Future plans... have the list of netcasts be read from the web. possibly an rss or such. I use greader so there might be a way to use it as the source so as not to have to muck with multiple lists

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Find the package that installed a command

find out how many days since given date
Exactly the same number of characters, exactly the same results, but with bc

Split video files using avconv along keyframes

finding cr-lf files aka dos files with ^M characters
Looking for carriage returns would also identify files with legacy mac line endings. To fix both types: $ perl -i -pe 's/\r\n?/\n/g' $(find . -type f -exec fgrep -l $'\r' "{}" \;)


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: