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

grep certain file types recursively

Create multiple mp4 files using avidemux
Convert multiple files using avidemux. Version updated (thanks to the guys who helped me giving me hints about how to improve the command). Works with files whose name contains blank characters. One of the reasons why I love open source: everyone can take something "done" and improve it to make it better! If u have suggestions, please let me know.

Find file containing namespace in a directory of jar files.
You could subsitute javax.servlet for any namespace you need.

A function to output a man page as a pdf file
Tested on Fedora 12. This function will take a man page and convert it to pdf, saving the output to the current working directory. In Gnome, you can then view the output with "gnome-open file.pdf", or your favorite pdf viewer.

Get information on your graphics card on linux (such as graphics memory size)
probably only works if you have one graphics card. used this: http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-find-linux-vga-video-card-ram/ as reference can be expanded, for example: $ lspci -v -s `lspci | awk '/VGA/{print $1}'` | sed -n '/Memory.*, prefetchable/s/.*\[size=\([^]]\+\)\]/\1/p' will just get the amount of prefetchable memory compare to: $ lshw -C display which does not give the size (it does give byte ranges and you could calculate the size from that, but that's a pain) Also uses a command which is not standard on linux; wheras lspci is a core utility provided by most systems

Copy a file using dd and watch its progress
This is a more accurate way to watch the progress of a dd process. The $DDPID=$! is needed so that you don't get the PID of the sleep. The sleep 1 is needed because in my testing at least, if you run kill -USR1 against dd too quickly, it will kill it off instead of display the status. So you need to wait a second, probably so that it can configure itself to trap the USR1 signal.

Display packages and versions on Debian/Ubuntu distrib
Need admin right to run dpkg-query

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

Play random music from blip.fm

Live stream a remote audio device over ssh using only ffmpeg
Change parameter 'plughw:0,0' in accordance with your audio device. To learn 'plughw' option, type the command aplay -l.


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: