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

See n most used commands in your bash history
You can append these commands to the bottom of the history file to access them easier with the Up key: $ sort ~/.bash_history|uniq -c|sort -n|tail -n 10|tr -s " "|cut -d' ' -f3- >> ~/.bash_history

list files recursively by size

Convert text to picture
generates a picture file with the text. Some other samples in: http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/

Clean way of re-running bash startup scripts.
This replaces the current bash session with a new bash session, run as an interactive non-login shell... useful if you have changed /etc/bash.bashrc, or ~/.bashrc If you have changed a startup script for login shells, use $ exec bash -l Suitable for re-running /etc/profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile. edit: chinmaya points out that $ env - HOME=$HOME TERM=$TERM bash -s "exec bash -l" will clear any shell variables which have been set... since this verges on unwieldy, might want to use $ alias bash_restart='env - HOME=$HOME TERM=$TERM bash -s "exec bash -l"'

Print text string vertically, one character per line.
Define a function $ vert () { echo $1 | grep -o '.'; } Use it to print some column headers $ paste

youtube2m3u
generate playlists from youtube ( or othre things that support yt-dlp)

View all new log messages in real time with color

converting vertical line to horizontal line

Create commands to download all of your Picasaweb albums
Create commands to download all of your Picasaweb albums Install Googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) and authenticate first.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)


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: