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

Found how how much memory in kB $PID is occupying in Linux
The "proportional set size" is probably the closest representation of how much active memory a process is using in the Linux virtual memory stack. This number should also closely represent the %mem found in ps(1), htop(1), and other utilities.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Random quote from Borat -- no html parsing
Turns out smacie.com has a text file containing every single one of the borat quotes, each one on a newline. This makes it very convenient, as this can be done without any sed-parsing, and uses less bandwitdth! Note that borate quotes are quite offensive, much more so than "fortunes-off"!

Decode a MIME message
will decode a mime message. usefull when you receive some email and file attachment that cant be read.

Have a random "cow" say a random thing
You need to have fortune and cowsay installed. It uses a subshell to list cow files in you cow directory (this folder is default for debian based systems, others might use another folder). you can add it to your .bashrc file to have it great you with something interesting every time you start a new session.

Batch-Convert text file containing youtube links to mp3

Copy data using gtar
It copies the entire current working directory to the destination directory with compression enabled.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Tail a log file with long lines truncated
This truncates any lines longer than 80 characters. Also useful for looking at different parts of the line, e.g. cut -b 50-100 shows columns 50 through 100.

Execute a command before display the bash prompt
For example, if you are the type who type ls very often, then $ PROMPT_COMMAND=ls will ls after every command you issue.


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: