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

start a tunnel from some machine's port 80 to your local post 2001
now you can acces the website by going to http://localhost:2001/

Base conversions with bc
Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing "ibase=16; obase=8; F2A" to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

Create a tar of directory structure only

concat multiple videos into one (and add an audio track)
This is an extract from a larger script which formats the video for DVD. The videos I use have no audio track so I need to add one. Tweak as you like...

Pronounce an English word using Merriam-Webster.com
Looks up a word on merriam-webster.com, does a screen scrape for the FIRST audio pronunciation and plays it. USAGE: Put this one-liner into a shell script (e.g., ~/bin/pronounce) and run it from the command line giving it the word to say: $ pronounce lek If the word isn't found in merriam-webster, no audio is played and the script returns an error value. However, M-W is a fairly complete dictionary (better than howjsay.com which won't let you hear how to pronounce naughty words). ASSUMPTIONS: GNU's sed (which supports -r for extended regular expressions) and Linux's aplay. Aplay can be replaced by any program that can play .WAV files from stdin. KNOWN BUGS: only the FIRST pronunciation is played, which is problematic if you wanted a particular form (plural, adjectival, etc) of the word. For example, if you run this: $ pronounce onomatopoetic you'll hear a voice saying "onomatopoeia". Playing the correct form of the word is possible, but doing so might make the screen scraper even more fragile than it already is. (The slightest change to the format of m-w.com could break it).

Sort by IP address

Remux an avi video if it won't play easily on your media device
When playback of AVI files (containing a video format like XviD or DivX) is stuttering, it in 90% of the files is caused by a poorly or wrongly interleaved file. The issue can be permanently resolved by RE-MUXING the AVI video-files that have this problem

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Auto-log commands
A quick alias I use right before logging into a server so that I have a log of the transactions as well as the ability to re-connect from another computer. Useful for when your boss says "what commands did you run again on that server?" and you had already closed the terminal ;) I wrapped it in a script now, with more features, but this is the heart of it. Never leave home without it.

Populate a folder with symbolic links to files listed in an m3u playlist.
This command will place symbolic links to files listed in an m3u playlist into a specified folder. Useful for uploading playlists to Google Music. prefix = The full path prefix to file entries in your .m3u file, if the file paths are relative. For example, if you have "Music/folder/song.mp3" in your list.m3u, you might want to specify "/home/username" as your prefix. list.m3u = Path to the playlist target_folder = Path to the target folder in which you would like to create symlinks


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: