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

Size(k) of directories(Biggest first)
somewhat faster version to see the size of our directories. Size will be in Kilo Bytes. to view smallest first change '-k1nr' to '-k1n'.

make a log of a terminal session
Creates a log of a session in a file called typescript. Or specify the file with: $script filename Exit the session with control-d.

search for a file in PATH
Also searches for aliases and shell builtins

show framebuffer console modes to use in grub vga option
look at /boot/grub/menu.lst for somethig like: ## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the ## alternatives ## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5 ## defoptions=vga=795 # defoptions=vga=873 ## altoption boot targets option ## multiple altoptions lines are allowed ## e.g. altoptions=(extra menu suffix) extra boot options ## altoptions=(recovery) single # altoptions=(verbose mode) vga=775 debug # altoptions=(console mode) vga=ask # altoptions=(graphic mode) quiet splash # altoptions=(recovery mode) single vga=(decimal value) is framebuffer mode

send DD a signal to print its progress
every 1sec sends DD the USR1 signal which causes DD to print its progress.

Go to the previous sibling directory in alphabetical order
Based on linkinpark342 suggestion. Sometimes you have to browse your way through a lot of sub-directories. This command cd to the previous sub-directory in alphabetical order. For example, if you have the directories "lectures/01-intro", "lectures/02-basic", "lectures/03-advanced" and so on, and your PWD is "02-basic", it jumps to "01-intro".

list files recursively by size

Merge video files together using mencoder (part of mplayer)
Using mplayer's mencoder, you can merge video files together. '-oac' specifies the audio encoding (here copy, to just copy and not compress) '-ovc' specifies the video encoding (same thing).

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

List manually installed packages (excluding Essentials)


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: