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

Function to output an ASCII character given its decimal equivalent
I've corrected the function. My octal conversion formula was completely wrong. Thanks to pgas at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ/071 for setting me straight. The new function is from pgas and is very fast.

random xkcd comic
i sorta stole this from http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=878#MTC_form but it didn't work, so here it is, fixed. --- updated to work with jpegs, and to use a fancy positive look behind assertion.

Find the package that installed a command

Restart command if it dies.
works well in crontab.

Check if the LHC has destroyed the world
This says if the LHC has destroyed the world. Run it in a loop to monitor the state of Earth. Might not work reliable, if the world has actually been destroyed.

Determine what an process is actually doing

Converting video file (.flv, .avi etc.) to .3gp
ffmpeg -i = input file name -s = set frame size, qcif=176x144 -vcodec = force video codec -r = frame-rate [default = 25] -b = bit-rate [200 kb/s] -acodec = force audio codec -ab = audio bitrate in bits/s [64k] -ac = no. of audio channels [1] -ar = audio sampling frequency [44100 Hz] optional: -sameq = use same video quality as source (implies VBR) -f = force format -y = overwrite output files

re-assign line numbers

Transcode .flac to .wav with gstreamer
Takes all .flac directories, feeds them into a simple transcode pipeline to spit out .wavs with the same name (but correct extension).

Count the number of pages of all PDFs in current directory and all subdirs, recursively


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: