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

Execute a command with a timeout
In this example the command "somecommand" will be executed and sent a SIGALARM signal if it runs for more than 10 seconds. It uses the perl alarm function. It's not 100% accurate on timing, but close enough. I found this really useful when executing scripts and commands that I knew might hang E.g. ones that connect to services that might not be running. Importantly this can be used within a sequential script. The command will not release control until either the command completes or the timeout is hit.

Silently ensures that a FS is mounted on the given mount point (checks if it's OK, otherwise unmount, create dir and mount)
In my example, the mount point is /media/mpdr1 and the FS is /dev/sdd1 /mountpoint-path = /media/mpdr1 filesystem=/dev/sdd1 Why this command ? Well, in fact, with some external devices I used to face some issues : during data transfer from the device to the internal drive, some errors occurred and the device was unmounted and remounted again in a different folder. In such situations, the command mountpoint gave a positive result even if the FS wasn't properly mounted, that's why I added the df part. And if the device is not properly mounted, the command tries to unmount, to create the folder (if it exists already it will also work) and finally mount the FS on the given mount point.

Decode base64-encoded file in one line of Perl
Another option is openssl.

One liner to parse all epubs in a directory and use the calibre ebook-convert utility to convert them to mobi format
all ebook-convert -options are optional. all you really need to pass ebook-convert is the incoming and outgoing names, with extensions. Has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

An easter egg built into python to give you the Zen of Python

Listen to a song from youtube with youtube-dl and mpv
Explanation Firstly the function checks if user gave it any input, and notifies the user if they failed to do so. If user has inputed a search string, the function will call upon youtube-dl to find url of the audio of the first matching youtube video and play that with mpv. Call function by wrapping search string in quotes: listen-to-yt "sultans of swing" You have to paste the line in your .zshrc and source .zshrc for it to work. Limitations The dependancies are youtube-dl and mpv. this oneliner is stolen from http://www.bashoneliners.com/oneliners/302/

The Chromium OS rootfs is mounted read-only. In developer mode you can disable the rootfs verification, enabling it to be modified.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

this toggles mute on the Master channel of an alsa soundcard


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: