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

Convert seconds into minutes and seconds
This is a very simple way to input a large number of seconds and get a more useful value in minutes and seconds. Avoids useless use of echo.

Select rectangular screen area
Hold 'Ctrl' + 'Alt' key while selecting rectangular text area of the screen with left mouse button. Should work in any terminal screen (xterm, konsole, ...) under X, if not then try with 'Ctrl' + 'Shift' + 'Alt' or two-combination of these.

search ubuntu packages to find which package contains the executable program programname
search ubuntu's remote package source repositories for a specific program to see which package contains it

one-line log format for svn
the output of svn log is annoying to grep, since it spreads the useful info over multiple lines. This compacts the output down to one line so eg you can grep for a comment and see the rev, date & committer straight away. Updated: MUCH shorter, easier to remember. Now it just replaces newlines with spaces, except on '---' lines.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Installing debian on fedora (chrooted)

add the result of a command into vi
':r!ls -l' results in listing the files in the current directory and paste it into vi

Trojan inverse shell
To connect to the shell run: $ nc server.example.org 2000

Add a Clock to Your CLI

Unrar multiple directories into current working directory
Grabs all rar files in any current subdirectories and feeds it to unrar. Doesn't work well with things packaged like file.part01.rar. Works best with File.rar. You can recurse into other directories by adding more /*'s


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: