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

Speak & Spell-esque glitch sounds
The Speak & Spell's sound chip uses a compressed audio format called "linear predictive coding". This command will read random bytes and attempt to decompress them as if it were audio data compressed in this format, then play it. This results in a unique sound which is similar to a glitching Speak & Spell.

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" }

IBM AIX: Extract a .tar.gz archive in one shot
This command is for UNIX OSes that have plain vanilla System V UNIX commands instead of their more functional GNU counterparts, such as IBM AIX.

Lock the hardware eject button of the cdrom
This command will lock the hardware eject button of your cdrom drive. Some uses are: 1: If you have a toddler and has discovered the cdrom button 2: If you are carrying a laptop in a bag or case and don't want it to eject if the button is inadvertently pressed. To unlock the button use: $ eject -i 0

Create a local compressed tarball from remote host directory
This improves on #9892 by compressing the directory on the remote machine so that the amount of data transferred over the network is much smaller. The command uses ssh(1) to get to a remote host, uses tar(1) to archive and compress a remote directory, prints the result to STDOUT, which is written to a local file. In other words, we are archiving and compressing a remote directory to our local box.

Show a prettified list of nearby wireless APs

Run command in an ftp session
By putting ! in front of a command, we are able to run it from an ftp session.

Search $PATH for a command or something similar
Searches your $PATH for whatever you substitute for bash, though not sure if this will work if you substitute a different shell for bash!

prevents replace an existing file by mistake
Use set +o noclobber and you will be able to replace files again

Quick syntax highlighting with multiple output formats
You can specify various output formats, theme styles, etc. $ python -m pygments -o source.png source.py $ python -m pygments -o source.rtf source.py Check available output formats, styles, etc.: $ python -m pygments -L Find pygments module here: http://pygments.org/


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: