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

shell bash iterate number range with for loop

Virtualbox rsync copy (without defining any virtualbox configuration)
That is, after running `vagrant ssh-config` to determine ports and ip's: $ vagrant ssh-config Host default HostName 127.0.0.1 User vagrant Port 2200 UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null StrictHostKeyChecking no PasswordAuthentication no IdentityFile /Users/romanvg/tmp/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key IdentitiesOnly yes LogLevel FATAL

Make info pages much less painful
The pinfo package makes info pages much more bearable. It is a ncurses-based POSIX utility for viewing info and man pages using lynx style keyboard shortcuts and rendering. Links are highlighted blue, the current location of your cursor is red. Navigating and searching are easy. Worth the install.

Rename files in batch

Short one line while loop that outputs parameterized content from one file to another
The above is an example of grabbing only the first column. You can define the start and end points specifically by chacater position using the following command: $ while read l; do echo ${l:10:40}; done < three-column-list.txt > column-c10-c40.txt Of course, it doesn't have to be a column, or extraction, it can be replacement $ while read l; do echo ${l/foo/bar}; done < list-with-foo.txt > list-with-bar.txt Read more about parameter expansion here: http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/pe Think of this as an alternative to awk or sed for file operations

Use file(1) to view device information
file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands. See also: $ file -s /dev/dm-* $ file -s /dev/cciss/* etc..

Sync the date of one server to that of another.
(Useful when firewalls prevent you from using NTP.)

Get your internal IP address and nothing but your internal IP address
Will return your internal IP address.

Extracting frames from a video as jpeg files
This command extracts 10 seconds worth of frames, starting from 00:15:45 position, from filename.avi and stores them into out_frames folder as jpeg files. Subtitles are turned off with -sid 999 option.

Swap the two last arguments of the current command line
Say you just typed a long command like this: $ rsync -navupogz --delete /long/path/to/dir_a /very/long/path/to/dir_b but you really want to sync dir_b to dir_a. Instead of rewriting all the command line, just type followed by , and your command line will read $ rsync -navupogz --delete /very/long/path/to/dir_b /long/path/to/dir_a


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: