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

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
- Where $URL is the URL of the file. - Replace the $2 by $3 at the end to get a human-readable size. Credits to svanberg @ ArchLinux forums for original idea. Edit: Replaced command with better version by FRUiT. (removed unnecessary grep)

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)
Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

Simple Video Surveillance by email
This takes a picture (with the web cam) every 5 minutes, and send the picture to your e-mail. Some systems support mail -a "References: " so that all video surveillance emails are grouped in a single email thread. To keep your inbox clean, it is still possible to filter and move to trash video surveillance emails (and restore these emails only if you really get robbed!) For instance with Gmail, emails sent to me+trash@gmail.com can be filtered with "Matches: DeliveredTo:me+trash@gmail.com"

Test http request every second, fancy display.
Use the command watch, which is really hard to pass nested quotes to, and insert newlines where they are supposed to go in the HTTP request. that is after 1.1 after the host and two newlines at the end before the EOF. i use this all day what? no support for HEREDOCs on commandlinefu's interface? need more fu.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

Check syntax of remote ruby file

strace like SystemTap script
The stap script is : #! /usr/bin/env stap probe syscall.* { if (pid() == target()) printf("%s %s\n", name, argstr); }

Count number of files in a directory


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: