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

remove *.jpg smaller than 500x500

The top ten commands you use

Change the window title of your xterm
If you are using an xterm emulation capable terminal emulator, such as PuTTY or xterm on Linux desktop, this command will replace the title of that terminal window. I know it is not nice to have seventeen terminals on your desktop with title PuTTY, you can not tell which one is connected to which server and doing what. Even though the string between the quotes is typed as literals, it needs a little more finesse to make it work. Here is how it is done key-by-key: echo "( ctrl-v then ctrl-[ )0;Enter_Title_String_Here( ctrl-v then ctrl-g )"( enter ) ctrl-v : means hold down ctrl key and hit v at the same time like you are pasting in windoze ; also please don't type the parentheses, i.e., ( and )

Print the 10 deepest directory paths

Google Translate
allow multiword translations

write the output of a command to /var/log/user.log... each line will contain $USER, making this easy to grep for.
This command is useful if you want to copy the output of a series of commands to a file, for example if you want to pastebin the output from 'uname -a', 'lspci -vvv' and 'lsmod' for video driver trouble-shooting on your favorite Linux forum. 'log' takes all the following arguments as a command to execute, with STDOUT sent to /var/log/user.log. The command is echoed to the log before it is executed. The advantages of using logger (as opposed to appending output from commands to a file) are 1) commands are always appended to the logs... you don't have to worry about clobbering your log file accidentally by using '>' rather than '>>' 2) logs are automatically cleaned up by logrotate. The following functions allow you to mark the start and end of a section of /var/log/user.log. $ startlog() { export LOGMARK=$(date +%Y.%m.%d_%H:%M:%S); echo "$LOGMARK.START" | logger -t $USER; } then $ endlog() { echo "$LOGMARK.END" | logger -t $USER; } printlog will print all lines between $LOGMARK.START and $LOGMARK.END, removing everything that is prepended to each line by logger. $ printlog() { sudo sed -n -e "/$LOGMARK.START/,/$LOGMARK.END/p" /var/log/user.log| sed "s/.*$USER: //"; } The following command should dump just about all the information that you could possibly want about your linux configuration into the clipboard. $ startlog; for cmd in 'uname -a' 'cat /etc/issue' 'dmesg' 'lsusb' 'lspci' 'sudo lshw' 'lsmod'; do log $cmd; done; endlog; printlog | xsel --clipboard This is ready for a trip to http://pastebin.com/, and you don't have to worry about leaving temporary files lying around cluttering up $HOME. Caveats: I'm sure that startlog, endlog, and printlog could use some cleanup and error checking... there are unchecked dependencies between printlog and endlog, as well as between endlog and startlog. It might be useful for 'log' to send stderr to logger as well.

Generate random valid mac addresses
Ruby version. Also, a perl version: $perl -e 'printf("%.2x.",rand(255))for(1..5);printf("%.2x\n",rand(255))'

Manually Pause/Unpause Firefox Process with POSIX-Signals
Continue with: $killall -CONT -m firefox Suspends all Firefox Threads. Results in Zero CPU load. Useful when having 100+ Tabs open and you temporarily need the power elsewhere. Be careful - might produce RACE CONDITIONS or LOCKUPS in other processes or FF itself. matching is case sensitive.

Remove all zero size files from current directory (not recursive)
works only in zsh

Find out how much data is waiting to be written to disk
Ever ask yourself "How much data would be lost if I pressed the reset button?" Scary, isn't it?


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: