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

Quicker move to parent directory
Alias two dots to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file.

Auto Rotate Cube (compiz)
Strip my code to: wmctrl -o 0,0 # autorotates to the first face. In fact [0-1279],0 wmctrl - 1280,0 # goes to the second face wmctrl -o 2560,0 # goes to the third face, and so on. # Use multiples of the horizontal display resolution. My example work for 1280x800 display, been 1280 the number of interest. Tweak the number, try a biiiig one and see your cube spinning... I put a complex example to show how fun things can be, even for my ademco and paradox alarm central network advisor interface xpto etc. It rotates two faces, print the alarm message, and goes back tho where it was. Tested on BIGLINUX 4.2, equivalent to ubuntu LTS hardy. Do not forget to activate 3D efects ( compiz cube )

Browse shared folder when you're the only Linux user
Under Ubuntu smbclient is part of the samba package. With the version I use (3.0.28a) cd-ing into folders with spaces in the name is a drag. You have to put the folder name in quotes: smb: \Shared\> cd "Marketing and PR"

See where a shortened url takes you before click

rename files according to file with colums of corresponding names
Maybe simpler, but again, don't know how it will work with space in filename.

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase
This will convert filenames from uppercase to lowercase. I find this useful after downloading images from my digital camera. This works for English, but other languages may need something slightly more complex like this: $ for i in *; do mv "$i" "$(echo $i|tr [:upper:] [:lower:])"; done Also, the quote marks aren't necessary if your filenames don't contain spaces.

Create a single-use TCP (or UDP) proxy
Redirect the local port 2000 to the remote port 3000. The same but UDP: $ nc -u -l -p 2000 -c "nc -u example.org 3000" It may be used to "convert" TCP client to UDP server (or viceversa): $ nc -l -p 2000 -c "nc -u example.org 3000"

Replace "space" char with "dot" char in current directory file names

FizzBuzz in one line of Bash
The (in)famous "FizzBuzz" programming challenge, answered in a single line of Bash code. The "|column" part at the end merely formats the output a bit, so if "column" is not installed on your machine you can simply omit that part. Without "|column", the solution only uses 75 characters. The version below is expanded to multiple lines, with comments added. for i in {1..100} # Use i to loop from "1" to "100", inclusive. do ((i % 3)) && # If i is not divisible by 3... x= || # ...blank out x (yes, "x= " does that). Otherwise,... x=Fizz # ...set x to the string "Fizz". ((i % 5)) || # If i is not divisible by 5, skip (there's no "&&")... x+=Buzz # ...Otherwise, append (not set) the string "Buzz" to x. echo ${x:-$i} # Print x unless it is blanked out. Otherwise, print i. done | column # Wrap output into columns (not part of the test).

Email yourself a short note
I created this so I could send myself an email alert when a long-running job was finished, e.g., $ my_long_job.exe ; quickemail my_long_job.exe has finished


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: