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

Printout a list of field numbers (awk index) from a CSV file with headers as first line.
Useful to identify the field number in big CSV files with large number of fields. The index is the reference to use in processing with commands like 'cut' or 'awk' involved.

Bare Metal IRC Client
Uses the extremely cool utilities netcat and expect. "expect" logs in & monitors for server PING checks. When a PING is received it sends the PONG needed to stay connected. IRC commands to try: HELP, TIME, MOTD, JOIN and PRIVMSG The "/" in front of IRC commands are not needed, e.g. type JOIN #mygroup Learn about expect: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/issue48/fisher.html The sample output shows snippets from an actual IRC session. Please click UP button if you like it!

bash function to check for something every 5 seconds
checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for. 'while : ; do' is an infinite loop '$*' executes the command passed in 'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh Ctrl-c to break the loop

remove the last of all html files in a directory
sed can be used deleting the last line and with -i option, there's no need to for temp files, the change is made on the actual file

split large video file
i have a large video file, 500+ MB, so i cant upload it to flickr, so to reduce the size i split it into 2 files. the command shows the splitting for the first file, from 0-4 minutes. ss is start time and t is duration (how long you want the output file to be). credit goes to philc: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=480343 NOTE: when i made the second half of the video, i got a *lot* of lines like this: frame= 0 fps= 0 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=10000000000.00 bitrate= 0.0kbit just be patient, it is working =)

Speed up launch of liferea
If you use liferea frequently, you will see obvious speedup after you executed this command.

deaggregate ip ranges
Taking file with ip ranges, each on it's own line like: $cat ipranges.txt 213.87.86.160-213.87.86.193 213.87.87.0-213.87.88.255 91.135.210.0-91.135.210.255 command returns deaggregated ip ranges using ipcalc deaggregate feature like that: 213.87.86.160/27 213.87.86.192/31 213.87.87.0/24 213.87.88.0/24 91.135.210.0/24 Useful for configuring nginx geo module

Compare two directory trees.
This uses Bash's "process substitution" feature to compare (using diff) the output of two different process pipelines.

Examine processes generating traffic on your website
I often have to google this so I put it here for quick reference.

Get the number of days in a given month and year


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: