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

Give {Open,True}Type files reasonable names
Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts. I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension. REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious). BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way". On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script.

open path with your default program (on Linux/*BSD)
open [path] in the default program, regardless of which Desktop Environment you use (KDE, GNOME, etc.) Works on all "freedesktop.org" compatible desktop environments

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Open multiple tabs in Firefox from a file containing urls
this will open a new tab in firefox for every line in a file the sleep is removable but i found that if you have a large list of urls 50+, and no sleep, it will try to open all the urls at once and this will cause them all to load a lot slower, also depending on the ram of your system sleep gives you a chance to close the tabs before they overload your ram, removing & >2/dev/null will yield unpredictable results.

Mount a Windows share on the local network (Ubuntu) with user rights and use a specific samba user

Find name of package which installed a given shell command
Some command names are very different from the name of the package that installed them. Sometimes, you may want to find out the name of the package that provided a command on a system, so that you can install it on another system.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Start another instance of X via SSH

Perl Simple Webserver
First we accept a socket and fork the server. Then we overload the new socket as a code ref. This code ref takes one argument, another code ref, which is used as a callback. The callback is called once for every line read on the socket. The line is put into $_ and the socket itself is passed in to the callback. Our callback is scanning the line in $_ for an HTTP GET request. If one is found it parses the file name into $1. Then we use $1 to create an new IO::All file object... with a twist. If the file is executable("-x"), then we create a piped command as our IO::All object. This somewhat approximates CGI support. Whatever the resulting object is, we direct the contents back at our socket which is in $_[0].


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: