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

execute a command in case of success or execute a command in case of failure

Monitor a file with tail with timestamps added
Should be a bit more portable since echo -e/n and date's -Ins are not.

Open a manpage in the default (graphical) web browser
An easy alias for opening a manpage, nicely HTML formatted, in your set internet browser. If you get a "command exited with status 3" error you need to install groff.

Shows cpu load in percent
Show the current load of the CPU as a percentage. Read the load from /proc/loadavg and convert it using sed: Strip everything after the first whitespace: $ sed -e 's/ .*//' Delete the decimal point: $ sed -e 's/\.//' Remove leading zeroes: $ sed -e 's/^0*//'

Find files that are older than x days
Find files that are older than x days in the working directory and list them. This will recurse all the sub-directories inside the working directory. By changing the value for -mtime, you can adjust the time and by replacing the ls command with, say, rm, you can remove those files if you wish to.

dont execute command just add it to history as a comment, handy if your command is not "complete" yet

Url Encode
It only encodes non-Basic-ASCII chars, as they are the only ones not well readed by UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 (latin-1). It converts all * C3 X (some latin symbols like ASCII-extended ones) and * C2 X (some punctuation symbols like inverted exclamation) ...UTF-8 double byte symbols to escaped form that every parser understands to form the URLs. I didn't encode spaces and the rest of basic punctuation, but supposedly, space and others are coded as \x20, for example, in UTF-8, latin-1 and Windows-cp1252.... so its read perfectly. Please feel free to correct, the application to which I designe that function works as expected with my assumption. Note: I specify a w=999, I didn't find a flag to put unlimited value. I just suppose very improbable surpass the de-facto 255 (* 3 byte max) = 765 bytes length of URL

Forget remembered path locations of previously ran commands
i.e.: Useful if you add ~/bin to your $PATH and you want to override locations of previously ran commands and you don't want to log out and log back in to be able to use them.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

rotate the compiz cube via command line
0-1279 = desktop 1 region = face 1 1280-2559 = face 2 ==>> wmctrl 1280 = wmctrl (1281,...2559) are all the same for a 1280 monitor resolution math: argument of wmctrl -o = ( DesiredFace * HorizontalResolution - 1)


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: