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

top 10 commands used

send DD a signal to print its progress
every 1sec sends DD the USR1 signal which causes DD to print its progress.

Lookup errno defintions
Calls the POSIX strerror() function to look up the meaning of integer ERRNOs set by some functions.

Converts all windows .URL shortcuts in a directory to linux (gnome) .desktop shortcuts

Speed up or slow down video (and audio)
Usage: videospeed video_filename speedchange newfilename videospeed foo.mp4 0.5 foo_slow.mp4 Range of 0.5 (50%) - 2.0 (200%) is valid.

A child process which survives the parent's death (for sure)
Test scenario: * Open xterm (or konsole, ...) * Start xeyes with: ( xeyes & ) * Close the xterminal The xeyes process should be still running.

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

mount a cdrom

Show total disk space on all partitions
show off how big your disks are

Create a new file


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: