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

Extract raw URLs from a file
you can also use cut instead of awk. less powerful but probably faster. ;)

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Renames all files in a directory named foo to bar. foobar1 gets renamed to barbar1 barfoo2 gets renamed to barbar2 fooobarfoo gets renamed to barobarfoo NOTE: Will break for files with spaces AND new lines AND for an empty expansion of the glob '*'

Change gnome-shell wallpaper

export iPad App list to txt file
This will generate the same output without changing the current directory, and filepath will be relative to the current directory. Note: it will (still) fail if your iTunes library is in a non-standard location.

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"

Generate Sha1, MD5 hash using echo
This is mostly for my own notes but this command will compute a md5 message digest from the command line. You can also replace md5sum with other checksum commands (e.g., sha1sum)

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Rename file to same name plus datestamp of last modification.
Note that the -i will not help in a script. Proper error checking is required.

Edit a file inside a compressed archive without extracting it
If you vim a compressed file it will list all archive content, then you can pickup any of them for editing and saving. There you have the modified archive without any extra step. It supports many file types such as tar.gz, tgz, zip, etc.

Convert mysql database from latin1 to utf8
MySQL: CHARSET from latin1 to utf8


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: