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

Count number of Line for all the files in a directory recursively

Kills a process that is locking a file.
Useful when you're trying to unmount a volume and other sticky situations where a rogue process is annoying the hell out of you.

Get absolut path to your bash-script
Another way of doing it that's a bit clearer. I'm a fan of readable code.

print character classes
Today I needed a way to print various character classes to use as input for a program I was writing. Also a nice way to visualize character classes.

find files in a date range
Find files in a specific date range - in this case, the first half of last year. -newermt = modification time of the file is more recent than this date GNU find allows any date specfication that GNU date would accept, e.g. $ find . -type f -newermt "3 years ago" ! -newermt "2 years ago" or $ find . -type f -newermt "last monday"

Create a local compressed tarball from remote host directory
The command uses ssh(1) to get to a remote host, uses tar(1) to archive a remote directory, prints the result to STDOUT, which is piped to gzip(1) to compress to a local file. In other words, we are archiving and compressing a remote directory to our local box.

shell function to make gnu info act like man.
For those who hate navigating info pages, a shell function which will dump the contents to stdout, then page it through less, thus acting like 'man'.

Trick find -exec option to execute alias
An alias cannot be executed as command in a find -exec line. This form will trick the command line and let you do the job.

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.

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: