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

Loop over the days of a month, in $YYYY$MM$DD format
Edit YYYY and MM at the beginning of the command with the year and month you want. Note that `DD=$(printf "%02d" $d)` will pad single digit integers with a leading zero. Substitute `echo $YYYY$MM$DD` at the end of the line with the command you want to launch, for instance script.pl --yyyymmdd $YYYY$MM$DD Also available on GitHub as bash util: https://github.com/fibo/yyyymmdd

Recurse through directories easily
This is a simple case of recursing through all directories, adding the '.bak' extension to every file. Of course, the 'cp $file $file.bak' could be any code you need to apply to your recursion, including tests, other functions, creating variables, doing math, etc. Simple and clean recursion.

Cleanup firefox's database.

Convert all WMF images to SVG recursively ignoring file extension case
This assumes you have the package installed necessary for converting WMF files. On my Ubuntu box, this is libwmf-bin. I used this command, as libwmf is not on my wife's iMac, so I archived the directories containing the WMF files from OS X, ran them on my Ubuntu box, archived the resulting SVGs, and sent them back to her. Quick, simple and to the point. Searches directories recursively looking for extensions ignoring case. This is much more readable and clean than -exec for find. The while loop also gives further flexibility on complex logic. Also, although there is 'wmf2svg --auto', it expects lowercase extensions, and not uppercase. Because I want to ignore case, I need to use the -o option instead. Works in ZSH and BASH. Haven't tested in other shells.

MySQL: Slice out a specific table from the output of mysqldump
Only filters the statement related to a specific table ('departments', in the example), from the output of mysqldump

Add an audio soundtrack to a series of images to create an flv
Creates a 5 minute flv file, with the given sequence of images and audio with 0.5 fps. The images were created using the following command: for x in `seq 0 300`; do cp ../head.PNG head-`printf '%03d' $x`.png; done You can also inject metadata to seek easier using yamdi as follows: yamdi -i muxed.flv -o video.flv

Add strikethrough to text

Find all the files more than 10MB, sort in descending order of size and record the output of filenames and size in a text file.
This command specifies the size in Kilobytes using 'k' in the -size +(N)k option. The plus sign says greater than. -exec [cmd] {} \; invokes ls -l command on each file and awk strips off the values of the 5th (size) and the 9th (filename) column from the ls -l output to display. Sort is done in reversed order (descending) numerically using sort -rn options. A cron job could be run to execute a script like this and alert the users if a dir has files exceeding certain size, and provide file details as well.

vmstat/iostat with timestamp
Also useful with iostat, or pretty much anything else you want timestamped.

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.


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: