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

Adding leading zeros to a filename (1.jpg -> 001.jpg)
From: http://grml.org/zsh/zsh-lovers.html

Connect to google talk through ssh by setting your IM client to use the localhost 5432 port
If your firewall or proxy at your location prevents connection to a particular host or port, you can use ssh to tunnel to your home server and do it there instead.

SSH connection through host in the middle

An alias to re-run last command with sudo. Similar to "sudo !!"
I didn't come up with this myself, but I always add this to my .bash_aliases file. It's essentially the same idea as running "sudo !!" except it's much easier to type. (You can't just alias "sudo !!", it doesn't really work for reasons I don't understand.) "fc" is a shell built-in for editing and re-running previous commands. The -l flag tells it to display the line rather than edit it, and the -n command tells it to omit the line number. -1 tells it to print the previous line. For more detail: $help fc

Create/open/use encrypted directory
Create/open/use an encrypted directory encfs needs to be installed During creation easiest to use default values The encrypted files will be in ~/.crypt and you will work as usual in ~/crypt To close the encrypted directory run: fusermount -u ~/crypt When you switch off the computer the encrypted directory will be automatically closed This example uses /home/user/crypt as encrypted directory I use ubuntu linux 8.04 and I am also the creator of www.minihowto.org

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

E-mail a traditional Berkeley mbox to another recipient as individual e-mails.

Fast command-line directory browsing
After typing cd directory [enter] ls [enter] so many times, I figured I'd try to make it into a function. I was surprised how smoothly I was able to integrate it into my work on the command line. Just use cdls as you would cd. It will automatically list the directory contents after you cd into the directory. To make the command always available, add it to your .bashrc file. Not quite monumental, but still pretty convenient.

colorize comm output
It just colorizes the line based on if it has 0, 1 or 2 tabs at the beginning of the line. Won't work so well if lines already begin with tabs (too bad comm doesn't have an option to substitute \t for something else). Don't forget comm needs input files to be sorted. You can use a shortcut like this with bash: comm

Remote Serial connection redirected over network using SSH
Requires software found at: http://lpccomp.bc.ca/remserial/ Remote [A] (with physical serial port connected to device) $./remserial -d -p 23000 -s "115200 raw" /dev/ttyS0 & Local [B] (running the program that needs to connect to serial device) Create a SSH tunnel to the remote server: $ssh -N -L 23000:localhost:23000 user@hostwithphysicalserialport Use the locally tunnelled port to connect the local virtual serial port to the remote real physical port: $./remserial -d -r localhost -p 23000 -l /dev/remser1 /dev/ptmx & Example: Running minicom on machine B using serial /dev/remser1 will actually connect you to whatever device is plugged into machine A's serial port /dev/ttyS0.


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: