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

Show a Command's Short Description
The whatis command displays a short description for the command you list on the command line. It is useful to quickly learn what a command does

list files in mtime order
Simple but useful; list files in the current directory in mtime order. Useful if you've been working on something and then take a day or two off.

list files recursively by size

purge installed but unused linux headers, image, or modules
will purge: only installed apps: /^ii/!d avoiding current kernel stuff: /'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d using app names: s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/ avoiding stuff without a version number: /[0-9]/!d

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

ubuntu tasksel
The command tasksel allows the choice of packages from the command line to get predefined configurations for specific services (usually this option is offered during installation).

Convert (almost) any video file into webm format for online html5 streaming

Show a git log with offsets relative to HEAD
Print a git log (in reverse order) giving a reference relative to HEAD. HEAD (the current revision) can also be referred to as HEAD~0 The previous revision is HEAD~1 then HEAD~2 etc. . Add line numbers to the git output, starting at zero: $ ... | nl -v0 | ... . Insert the string 'HEAD~' before the number using sed: $ ... | sed 's/^ \+/&HEAD~/' . Thanks to bartonski for the idea :-)

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }


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: