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

Find distro name and/or version/release
Works for most distributions, tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo, SUSE, RedHat. Debian and Slackware: $cat /etc/*version

Press Any Key to Continue
Halt script progress until a key has been pressed. Source: http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/doku.php/mirroring/bashfaq/065

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
As of this writing, this requires a fairly recent version of util-linux, but is much simpler than the previous alternatives. Basically, lsblk gives a nice, human readable interface to all the blkid stuff. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend this if you're going to be parsing the output.) This command takes all the fun out of the previous nifty pipelines, but I felt I ought to at least mention it as an alternative since it is the most practical.

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from

Convert every eps in a directory to pdf
Converts every *.eps file to a *.pdf file

phpinfo from the command line

Sort contents of a directory with human readable output
Show sizes of all files and directories in a directory in size order. $du -hs * | sort -hr for reverse order. Taken from http://serverfault.com/questions/62411/how-can-i-sort-du-h-output-by-size

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

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr

Copy your SSH public key on a remote machine for passwordless login - the easy way


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: