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

Listen to a file
replace "/usr/src/linux/kernel/signal.c" with any file you want and listen to its output ! :P you can also replace "cat" with "echo" or anything you can come up with have fun :-}

Ripping VCD in Linux
Ripping VCD in Linux

Put a console clock in top right corner
A nice way to use the console in full screen without forget the current time. you can too add other infos like cpu and mem use.

get the full description of a randomly selected package from the list of installed packages on a debian system
I put this command on my ~/.bashrc in order to learn something new about installed packages on my Debian/Ubuntu system each time I open a new terminal

Search manpages for a keyword
Search manpages for a keyword. Very useful when you don't know where to find the information.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

Process command output line by line in a while loop
This snippet allows to process the output of any bash command line by line.

Use curl with a local SOCKS5 proxy (e.g. Tor)
Routes curl input through a local SOCKS5 proxy; in this case, anonymizes curl activity via The Onion Router (Tor) proxy running locally. Note that the traffic will be anonymized, but it will NOT be encrypted, so your traffic will be very vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Print the contents of $VARIABLE, six words at a time
Print out the contents of $VARIABLE, six words per line, ignoring any single or double quotes in the text. Useful when $VARIABLE contains a sentence that changes periodically, and may or may not contain quoted text.

List the largest directories & subdirectoties in the current directory sorted from largest to smallest.


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: