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

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

set a reminder for 5 days in the future
setup for reminder in 5 days, added the date in the future. To run a job at 4pm three days from now, you would do at 4pm + 3 days, to run a job at 10:00am on July 31, you would do at 10am Jul 31 and to run a job at 1am tomorrow, you would do at 1am tomorrow.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
This command works by rsyncing the target directory (containing the files you want to delete) with an empty directory. The '--delete' switch instructs rsync to remove files that are not present in the source directory. Since there are no files there, all the files will be deleted. I'm not clear on why it's faster than 'find -delete', but it is. Benchmarks here: https://web.archive.org/web/20130929001850/http://linuxnote.net/jianingy/en/linux/a-fast-way-to-remove-huge-number-of-files.html

Live stream a remote desktop over ssh using only ffmpeg
Play with the framerate option '-r' to scale back bandwidth usage. The '-s' option is the captured screan area, not the rescaled size. If you want to rescale add a second '-s' option after '-i :0'. Rescaling smaller will also decrease bandwidth.

Gives you what's between first string and second string included.
If the file content is : - Blah blah blah ABC hello blah blah blah bloh bloh bloh DEF Bah bah bah - You'll get: - ABC hello blah blah blah bloh bloh bloh DEF

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Far from my favorite, but works in sh and with an old sed that doesn't support '-E'

Convert all files for iPhone with HandbrakeCLI

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested


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: