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

cycle through everything sox knows how to read, playing only the first three seconds
I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close. . I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`) . note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

Get OSX Battery percentage
adjusting the field "f1" will give you additional information such as f1 = 98% f2 = discharging f3 = 2:02 remaining

Adding a startup script to be run at bootup Ubuntu
This script will run each time you boot up.The script must be in /etc/init.d directory.

Bash logger

Securely destroy data on given device
Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'

Block all FaceBook traffic

simplest calculator

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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: