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

Hypnosis
rather don't depend on those sleepin'pills http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_sheep

Execute a command with a timeout
A timeout is great, but what if the command is taking longer than expected because it's hung up or ran into some other problem? That's where the -k option comes in. Run "some_command" and timeout after 30s. If the command is still running after 1 minute, it will receive a kill signal.

Perform a C-style loop in Bash.
Print 0 through 99, each on a separate line.

cycle through a 256 colour palette
just for fun

Get the current svn branch/tag (Good for PS1/PROMPT_COMMAND cases)
Get the svn info, grep for the "URL" of the repository, pull out the tag/branch/trunk, and then just show the helpful/meaningful bit.

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

Automatically rename tmux window using the current working directory
Adds a function that runs every time the prompt is rendered. The function grabs the CWD from PWD and issues a command to tmux to change the current window

Blink LED Port of NIC Card
Blinks LED of a NIC card. Its used when you have multiple NICs and you want to identify the physical port of a particular ethernet card.

Find out current working directory of a process

Numeric zero padding file rename
This uses Perl's rename utility (you may have to call it as prename on your box) and won't choke on spaces or other characters in filenames. It will also zero pad a number even in filenames like "vacation-4.jpg".


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: