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

Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh
If you are stuck behind a firewall and want to synchronize time with another server but you do not want to port forward NTP (which uses UDP) then this command is handy. It gets the time from a server and sets the local time. It is not that accurate but I can live with a second or so drift.

Convert all Flac in a directory to Mp3 using maximum quality variable bitrate

apt-get via sudo
An apt-get wrapper function which will run the command via sudo, but will run it normally if you're only downloading source files. This was a bit of an excuse to show off the framework of $ cmd && echo true || echo false ...but as you can see, you must be careful about what is in the "true" block to make sure it executes without error, otherwise the "false" block will be executed. To allow the apt-get return code to pass through, you need to use a more normal if/else block: $ apt-get () { if [ "$1" = source ]; then command apt-get "$@"; else sudo apt-get "$@"; fi }

Automatically find and re-attach to a detached screen session
man screen: "-D -R Attach here and now. In detail this means: If a session is running, then reattach. If necessary detach and logout remotely first. If it was not running create it and notify the user. This is the author?s favorite."

Colorized JSON pretty printing
Uses pygmentize and python to create indented and colorized JSON output

open path with your default program (on Linux/*BSD)
open [path] in the default program, regardless of which Desktop Environment you use (KDE, GNOME, etc.) Works on all "freedesktop.org" compatible desktop environments

Slightly better compressed archives
Avoids creating useless directory entries in archive, and sorts files by (roughly) extension, which is likely to group similar files together for better compression. 1%-5% improvement.

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Set OS X X11 to use installed Mathematica fonts

Make backups recurse through directories


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: