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

Display a random crass ascii art from www.asciiartfarts.com
Optionally, pipe the output into http://sed.sourceforge.net/grabbag/scripts/html2iso.sed Or: wget -qO - http://www.asciiartfarts.com/random.cgi | sed -n '//,//p' | sed -n '/

Create a new file

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Limit bandwidth usage by any program
Trickle is a voluntary, cooperative bandwidth shaper. it works entirely in userland and is very easy to use. The most simple application is to limit the bandwidth usage of programs.

Get info about a GitHub project
In this example we search for 'vim' but vim doesn't have a project on github right now. That's ok, this command still searches for every project that has 'vim' in their description (forks, plugins, etc). To get XML or JSON output just replace 'yaml' in the url with 'xml' or 'json'.

extracts 64 bytes of random digits from random lines out of /dev/random sent to stdio
Use this the next time you need to come up with a reasonably random bitstring, like for a WPA/WPA2 PSK or something. Takes a continuous stream of bytes coming from /dev/urandom, runs it through od(1), picking a random field ($0 and $1 excluded) from a random line and then prints it.

Numbers guessing game
Felt like I need to win the lottery, and wrote this command so I train and develop my guessing abilities.

Perl One Liner to Generate a Random IP Address
A bash version.

Convert a MOV captured from a digital camera to a smaller AVI
Convert those .mov files that your digital camera makes to .avi Adjust the bitrate (-b) to get the appropriate file size. A larger bitrate produces a larger (higher quality) .avi file and smaller bitrate produces a smaller (lower quality) .avi file. Requires ffmpeg (see man page for details) (tested with canon camera MOV files) Other examples: $ffmpeg -i input.mov -sameq -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi $ffmpeg -i input.mov -b 1024k -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi

alias to close terminal with :q
Put this in your ~/.bashrc file (or the equivalent) If you use vim a lot, this alias will be immediately obvious. Your brain will thank you.


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: