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

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" }

Gets the last string of previous command with !$
It helps you save a lot of writing :-)

View webcam output using mplayer
View webcam output using mplayer, with correct fps and outfmt settings according to my webcam model.

Indicates the position of my monitor buttons
I often need to change the brightness of my monitor. The symbols of the sensor buttons are not illuminated and on a black background .... invisible! Now i use osd_cat instead of a torch ;-)

delete a line from your shell history
If you're a moron like me, sometimes your fingers get away from you and you, for example, enter your password when you're already authenticated to ssh-agent, sudo, etc., and your password ends up in shell history. Here's how to get it out.

pip install into current directory without virtualenv
For subsequent commands in the prefixed path: $ PYTHONPATH=$PWD/lib/python*/site-packages ./bin/pip --version

Find files with the same names in several directories.
cat file1 file2 file3|sort|uniq -d finds the same lines in several files, especially in files with lists of files.

Display command lines visible on commandlinefu.com homepage
Uses the fabulous Hpricot library to parse HTML from Ruby. Extracts all elements of "command' class and displays unescaped text from inside these elements. The following command can help install dependencies (apart from Ruby itself) $ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com && sudo gem install why-hpricot

Print only the odd lines of a file (GNU sed)
The tilde address operator is an extension of GNU sed. It won't work with POSIX sed.

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing


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: