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

Installing True-Type fonts
First you have to create a directory in your system, where the fonts will be stored, and copy them. $ sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/miscttf; sudo cp *.ttf /usr/share/fonts/miscttf After recharge cache with the command

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Annotate tail -f with timestamps
Uses the command ts in order to add a timestamp on each line. This command is provided in the moreutils package on Debian, and you may need libtime-duration-perl to be able to format the date.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

LIST FILENAMES OF FILES CREATED TODAY IN CURRENT DIRECTORY
This version eliminates the grep before the awk, which is always good. It works for GNU core utils and ensures that the date output of ls matches the format in the pattern match, regardless of locale, etc. On BSD-based systems, you can easily eliminate both the grep and the awk: find . -maxdepth 1 -Btime -$(date +%kh%lm) -type f

list files with last modified at the end

reverse-i-search: Search through your command line history
"What it actually shows is going to be dependent on the commands you've previously entered. When you do this, bash looks for the last command that you entered that contains the substring "ls", in my case that was "lsof ...". If the command that bash finds is what you're looking for, just hit Enter to execute it. You can also edit the command to suit your current needs before executing it (use the left and right arrow keys to move through it). If you're looking for a different command, hit Ctrl+R again to find a matching command further back in the command history. You can also continue to type a longer substring to refine the search, since searching is incremental. Note that the substring you enter is searched for throughout the command, not just at the beginning of the command." - http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/using-bash-history-more-efficiently

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

Encode a string using ROT47
This command will encode a string using the ROT47 cipher.

Run the Firefox Profile Manager
even when another instance is already open. Great for testing purposes when you need to be 2 people at once on the same site.


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: