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 a video for archiving, from any site
Download video files from a bunch of sites (here is a list https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html). The options say: base filename on title, ignores errors and continue partial downloads. Also, stores some metadata into a .json file plz. Paste youtube users and playlists for extra fun. Protip: git-annex loves these files

Press enter and take a WebCam picture.
This command takes a 1280x1024 p picture from the webcam. If prefer it smaller, try changing the -s parameter: qqvga is the tiniest, vga is 640x480, svga is 800x600 and so on. Get your smile on and press enter! :)

Lock the hardware eject button of the cdrom
This command will lock the hardware eject button of your cdrom drive. Some uses are: 1: If you have a toddler and has discovered the cdrom button 2: If you are carrying a laptop in a bag or case and don't want it to eject if the button is inadvertently pressed. To unlock the button use: $ eject -i 0

Create passwords and store safely with gpg
Adjust the $ head -c part for password length. I use filenames like "hans@commandlinefu.com.gpg" and a vim which automatically decrypts files with .gpg suffixes.

Get a Bulleted List of SVN Commits By a User for a Specifc Day (Daily Work Log)
* Replace USERNAME with the desired svn username * Replace the first YYYY-MM-DD with the date you want to get the log (this starts at the midnight event that starts this date) * Replace the second YYYY-MM-DD with the date after you want to get the log (this will end the log scan on midnight of the previous day) Example, if I want the log for December 10, 2010, I would put {2010-12-10}:{2010-12-11}

Bash alias for creating screen session containing IRSSI, named irssi, while checking if existing session is created
Bash alias for easy irssi within screen, attempts to attach to existing irssi session, if one exists, otherwise creates one - Including wipe for when system reboots and leaves "dead" session.

This will allow you to browse web sites using "-dump" with elinks while you still are logged in
README: This require you to login on facebook with elinks without using '-dump' first time and when you have logged in you will then be able to dump all data from facebook without any advanced combos, dump is all you need for see all your friends newsfeed or whatever you wish to view in cli/terminal. Facebook is just an example, same requirements for all websites that have a login form.

Display connections histogram
Displays a connection histogram of active tcp connections. Works even better under an alias. Thanks @Areis1 for sharing this one.

shorten url using curl, sed and is.gd
Just create a function in your .bashrc like this shorturl() { curl -s -d URL="$1" http://is.gd/create.php | sed '/Your new shortened/!d;s/.*value="\([^"]*\)".*/\1/' }

list files recursively by size


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: