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

Show line numbers in a text file

Rename files in batch

Convert PDF to JPG
Without the bashisms and unnecessary sed dependency. Substitutions quoted so that filenames with whitespace will be handled correctly.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

send a circular

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Get a brief overview of how many files and directories are installed
To start, you first need to make sure updatedb has been run/updatedb, and initialized the db: $ su -l root -c updatedb This locate command is provided through the mlocate package, installed by default on most GNU/Linux distributions. It's available on the BSDs as well. Not sure about support for proprietary UNIX systems. The output is self-explanatory- it provides an overview of how many directories and files are on your system.

Short and sweet output from dig(1)
Turn off almost all of dig's output except for what you'd see in a zone file. This can also be put into ~/.digrc.

change exif data in all jpeg's
this takes every jpg in the current directory and changes the exif data for manufactur and model. in my case i change it to LOMO LC-A because my scanner puts his data in there :]

Salvage a borked terminal
If you bork your terminal by sending binary data to STDOUT or similar, you can get your terminal back using this command rather than killing and restarting the session. Note that you often won't be able to see the characters as you type them.


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: