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

Show a config file without comments
Shows a file without comments (at least those starting by #) - removes empty lines - removes lines starting by # or "some spaces/tabs then #'" Useful when you want to quickly see what you have to customize on a freshly installed application without reading the comments that sometimes are a full 1000 lines documentation :) While posting, I saw this http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1041/display-contents-of-a-file-wo-any-comments-or-blank-lines But it's dirty and incomplete, to my mind My original goal was to remove lines like "\t*#" but I can't figure out how to do a egrep '\t' on a command-line. Two workarounds if needed: $egrep -v 'press control + V then TAB then #' /your/file or $egrep -v -f some_file /your/file #where some_file contains what you want to exclude, example a really inserted TAB

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

clear the cache from memory

Search Google

Show Directories in the PATH Which does NOT Exist

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" }

Add a progress counter to loop (see sample output)
For this hack you need following function: $ finit() { count=$#; current=1; for i in "$@" ; do echo $current $count; echo $i; current=$((current + 1)); done; } and alias: $ alias fnext='read cur total && echo -n "[$cur/$total] " && read' Inspired by CMake progress counters.

Create a directory and change into it at the same time
How often do you make a directory (or series of directories) and then change into it to do whatever? 99% of the time that is what I do. This BASH function 'md' will make the directory path then immediately change to the new directory. By using the 'mkdir -p' switch, the intermediate directories are created as well if they do not exist.

translate what is in the clipboard in english and write it to the terminal
Uses google api to translate, you can modify the language in which translate modifying the parameter "langpair=|en", the format is language input|language output.

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


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: