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

Rip DVD to YouTube ready MPEG-4 AVI file using mencoder
Rip DVD to YouTube ready AVI file, using MPEG-4 video codec and MP3 audio codec. Resizes to 320x240 and deinterlaces as needed.

Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)
Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

Basic sed usage with xargs to refactor a node.js depdendency

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

Download a numbered sequence of files

Copy sparse files
This causes cp to detect and omit large blocks of nulls. Sparse files are useful for implying a lot of disk space without actually having to write it all out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file You can use it in a pipe too: $ dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=5 |cp --sparse=always /dev/stdin SPARSE_FILE

know the current running shell (the true)
Return the current shell. It is better than print $SHELL which can sometimes return a false value.

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" }

Run a bash script in debug mode, show output and save it on a file
Sends both stdout and stderr to the pipe which captures the data in the file 'out.test' and sends to stdout of tee (likely /dev/tty unless redirected). Works on Bourne, Korn and Bash shells.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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: