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

dstat - a mix of vmstat, iostat, netstat, ps, sar...
This is a very powerful command line tool to gather statistics for a Linux system. http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/

Erase to factory a pendrive, disk or memory card, and watch the progress

Count the number of characters in a string from the standard input.

Bash logger

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

list files recursively by size

Create a continuous digital clock in Linux terminal
Same effect, only shell commands.

du with colored bar graph
i'm using gawk, you may get varying mileage with other varieties. You might want to change the / after du to say, /home/ or /var or something, otherwise this command might take quite some time to complete. Sorry it's so obsfucated, I had to turn a script into a one-liner under 255 characters for commandlinefu. Note: the bar ratio is relative, so the highest ratio of the total disk, "anchors" the rest of the graph. EDIT: the math was slightly wrong, fixed it. Also, made it compliant with older versions of df.

Convert a SVG file to grayscale
It requires inkscape 0.46 and lxml packages


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: