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

Simple Video Surveillance by email
This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com"

Remove all leading and trailing spaces or tabs from all lines of a text file
Bash only, no sed, no awk. Multiple spaces/tabs if exists INSIDE the line will be preserved. Empty lines stay intact, except they will be cleaned from spaces and tabs if any available.

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Find directories over 50MB in the home directory

Rename all .jpeg and .JPG files to .jpg

Convert a string to "Title Case"

Screencast of your PC Display with mp4 output
Since ffmpeg on Ubuntu is deprecated, now there is avconv. Please note that the screen area here is set with a predefined format "-s wxga" that is corresponding to "-s 1366x768") There is also the option to add a title in the metadata of the resulting video.

list files recursively by size

shutdown pc in 4 hours without needing to keep terminal open / user logged in.
From the 'disown' man page: disown prevents the current shell from sending a HUP signal to each of the given jobs when the current shell terminates a login session.

Best option set for 7zip compression of database dumps or generic text files
These re the best option combination that works fine for compressing my database dumps. It's possible that there are another option or value that might improve the compression ratio, by these are the ones that worked, the syntax for 7zr it's a little messy...


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: