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

Separates each frame of a animated gif file to a counted file, then appends the frames together into one sheet file. Useful for making sprite sheets for games.
requires imagemagick

Set gnome wallpaper to a random jpg from the specified directory
Every time this is run it will change your background picture. For added fun Add some DBUS magic: . $HOME/.dbus/session-bus/`cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id`-0 export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and a crontab entry: */5 * * * * above_command_in_script.sh >/dev/null 2>/dev/null now wallpaper changes every 5 mins

loop over a set of items that contain spaces
If you want to operate on a set of items in Bash, and at least one of them contains spaces, the `for` loop isn't going to work the way you might expect. For example, if the current dir has two files, named "file" and "file 2", this would loop 3 times (once each for "file", "file", and "2"): $ for ITEM in `ls`; do echo "$ITEM"; done Instead, use a while loop with `read`: $ ls | while read ITEM; do echo "$ITEM"; done

Run a bash script in debug mode, show output and save it on a file
Sends both stdout and stderr to the pipe which captures the data in the file 'out.test' and sends to stdout of tee (likely /dev/tty unless redirected). Works on Bourne, Korn and Bash shells.

Shows cpu load in percent
This version is precise and requires one second to collect statistics. Check sample output for a more generic version and also a remote computer invocation variant. It doesn't work with the busybox version of the 'top' command but can be adjusted

Check the status of a network interface

Find the package that installed a command

Getting a domain from url, ex: very nice to get url from squid access.log

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Create md5sum of a directory


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: