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

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode

Insert a colon between every two digits
I sometimes have large files of MAC addresses stored in a file, some databases need the information stored with the semicolon (makes for easier programming a device) others don't. I have a barcode to text file scanner which usually butchers MAC addresses so this was the fix> I initially did this in awk ;) awk '{for(i=10;i>=2;i-=2)$0=substr($0,1,i)":"substr($0,i+1);print}' mac_address_list

Share your terminal session (remotely or whatever)
Force the user you want to watch doing things into doing his things in a screen session. Then simply attach yourself to that session with the command shown above. Works only if you are on the same machine, of course

Set up alarm with fade-in, for graceful awakening
There are a lot of commands, which invokes your player at specified time. But I prefer not to jump from by bed, when alarm start to play. Instead, this script increases volume of mpd over time, which much more pleasant when you just woke up :)

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Direct auto-complete in bash
Direct auto-complete in bash

Find out which debian package a command (executable) belongs to on debian-based distros
This revision to my command (command #8851) was called for when it failed to find the parent package of 'rlogin', which is really a deep symbolic link to /usr/bin/ssh. This revision fixes this newfound issue, while ensuring fixes of other older issues work too.

Search for classes in Java JAR files.

Terminal - Prints out, what the users name, notifyed in the gecos field, is

Create date-based tgz of current dir, runs in the background, very very cool
This is freaking sweet!!! Here is the full alias, (I didn't want to cause display problems on commandlinefu.com's homepage): $ alias tarred='( ( D=`builtin pwd`; F=$(date +$HOME/`sed "s,[/ ],#,g"


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: