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

cpuinfo

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

dont execute command just add it to history as a comment, handy if your command is not "complete" yet

Double your disk read performance in a single command
(WARN) This will absolutely not work on all systems, unless you're running large, high speed, hardware RAID arrays. For example, systems using Dell PERC 5/i SAS/SATA arrays. If you have a hardware RAID array, try it. It certainly wont hurt. You may be can test the speed disk with some large file in your system, before and after using this: $ time dd if=/tmp/disk.iso of=/dev/null bs=256k To know the value of block device parameter known as readahead. $ blockdev --getra /dev/sdb And set the a value 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, and maybe 16384... it really depends on the number of hard disks, their speed, your RAID controller, etc. (see sample)

Sort movies by length, longest first
Sort .avi movies by time length, print the longest first, and so on...

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available
Any changes to BASH shell made in .bashrc will be active in the current terminal window from the moment you execute this command, ie. aliases, prompt settings etc. No need to restart terminal. (In BASH 'source' simile to 'eval' lets you generally execute any bunch of commands stacked in a text file).

generate a unique and secure password for every website that you login to
usage: sitepass MaStErPaSsWoRd example.com description: An admittedly excessive amount of hashing, but this will give you a pretty secure password, It also eliminates repeated characters and deletes itself from your command history. tr '!-~' 'P-~!-O' # this bit is rot47, kinda like rot13 but more nerdy rev # this avoids the first few bytes of gzip payload, and the magic bytes.

Display a wave pattern
Purely frivolous - print a sine/cosine curve to the console - the width varies as it progresses. Ctrl-C to halt.

list files recursively by size

Tell local Debian machine to install packages used by remote Debian machine
(also works on Ubuntu) Copies the 'install,' 'hold,' 'deinstall' and 'purge' states of packages on the remote machine to be matched on the local machine. Note: if packages were installed on the local machine that were never installed on the remote machine, they will not be deinstalled by this operation.


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: