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 OSX resource forks ._ files
DESCRIPTION For each dir, dot_clean recursively merges all ._* files with their cor- responding native files according to the rules specified with the given arguments. By default, if there is an attribute on the native file that is also present in the ._ file, the most recent attribute will be used. If no operands are given, a usage message is output. If more than one directory is given, directories are merged in the order in which they are specified.

guitar synthesizer in one line of C
outputs a f=220Hz guitar string sound (fifth string A) needs ALSA

switch case of a text file

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

GRUB2: set Super Mario as startup tune

Who invoked me? / Get parent command
Get the name of the parent command. This might be helpful, if you need to react on that information. E. g. a script called directly via ssh has got sshd as parent, manually invoked the parent process will probably be bash

identify exported sonames in a path
This provides a list of shared object names (sonames) that are exported by a given tree. This is usually useful to make sure that a given required dependency (NEEDED entry) is present in a firmware image tree. The shorter (usable) version for it would be $ scanelf -RBSq -F "+S#f" But I used the verbose parameters in the command above, for explanation.

shush MOTD
I'm annoyed by the boilerplate "don't login unless you are supposed messages in our environment" - this shuts them up.

Release memory used by the Linux kernel on caches
The Linux kernel uses unused memory in caches. When you execute "free" you never get the "real" available memory.

Sniff ONLY POP3 authentication by intercepting the USER command
dsniff is general purpose password sniffer, it handles *lots* of different protocols, but it also handles tcp-style expressions for limiting analyzed traffic - so I can limit it to work on pop3 only.


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: