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

Delete a file/directory walking subdirectories (bash4 or zsh)

put command in a loop to keep trying a connection
This will keep trying to reconnect your netcat connection can be used with SSH or Telnet, just substitute nc for ssh or telnet very useful for troubleshooting VPNs were you want to send continuous packets towards a destination to trace.

Suspend to ram
No need to be root to do that. Relies on UPower (previously known as DeviceKit-Power).

force a rescan on a host of scsi devices (useful for adding partitions to vmware on the fly)

Parse a quoted .csv file
The $2, $3, $4 fields are arbitrary but note that the first field starts from $2 and the last field is $NF-1. This is due to the fact that the leading and trailing quotes are treated as field delimiters.

Rsync using SSH and outputing results to a text file
--delete will delete copies on remote to match local if deleted on local --stats will output the results -z zip -a archive -A preserve ACL -x don't cross filesystem boundaries -h human readable -e specify the remote shell to use

convert pdf into multiple png files
syntax for resolution is: (see "man gs" for further informations) -rnumber -rnumber1xnumber2

list all file extensions in a directory
Works on current directory, with built-in sorting.

Convert seconds into minutes and seconds
This is a very simple way to input a large number of seconds and get a more useful value in minutes and seconds.

shutdown pc in 4 hours without needing to keep terminal open / user logged in.
From the 'disown' man page: disown prevents the current shell from sending a HUP signal to each of the given jobs when the current shell terminates a login 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: