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

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text. Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent. Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher. (Does not require GNU date like some other commands)

create an incremental backup of a directory using hard links
dname is a directory named something like 20090803 for Aug 3, 2009. lastbackup is a soft link to the last backup made - say 20090802. $folder is the folder being backed up. Because this uses hard linking, files that already exist and haven't changed take up almost no space yet each date directory has a kind of "snapshot" of that day's files. Naturally, lastbackup needs to be updated after this operation. I must say that I can't take credit for this gem; I picked it up from somewhere on the net so long ago I don't remember where from anymore. Ah, well... Systems that are only somewhat slicker than this costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars - but we're HACKERS! We don't need no steenkin' commercial software... :)

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

sqlite3 cmd to extract Firefox bookmarks from places.sqlite
Found this useful query at http://id.motd.org/pivot/entry.php?id=22. The b.parent=2 in the command refers to the bookmarks folder to extract. See the source webpage for additional info.

Display BIOS Information
read the memory from C:0000 to F:FFFF without the need auf dmidecode

Display a block of text: multi-line grep with perl
-n reads input, line by line, in a loop sending to $_ Equivalent to while () { mycode } -e execute the following quoted string (i.e. do the following on the same line as the perl command) the elipses .. operator behaves like a range, remembering the state from line to line.

Find C/C++ source files
Find C/C++ source files and headers in the current directory.

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" }

Kill all processes belonging to a single user.

Shows what processes need to be restarted after system upgrade
emerge,apt-get,yum... all update your system. This will at some point replace either a runtime dependency or a process (which is still running). This oneliner will list what processes need to be restarted


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: