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

exec chmod to subfiles
Using `-exec cmd {} +` causes find to build the command using all matching filenames before execution, rather than once per file.

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Discover the process start time
That is useful to discover the start time of process older than 1 day. You can also run: $ ls -ld /proc/PID That's returning the creation date of the proc files from the process. Some users reported that this way might show you a wrong date since any other process like cron, for example, could change this date.

Create a file of repeated, non-zero
dd can be used with /dev/zero to easily create a file of all zero-bytes. Pipe that through tr and use octal conversions to change the byte values from zero to 0xff (octal 0377). You can replace 0377 with the byte of your choice. You can also use \\0 and \\377 instead of the quoted version.

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

Monitor the queries being run by MySQL

Webcam view with vlc
Quick command to test your webcam. Press 'f' to toggle fullscreen. Can also use 'vlc v4l2://' if you want gui controls. For higher/smoother framerate lower the default resolution: $ cvlc v4l2:// :v4l2-width=320 :v4l2-height=240 &

Turn white color to transparent for a series of png images
mogrify can be used like convert. The difference is that mogrify overwrites files: http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html Of course, other source colors can be used as well.

Rename files in batch

Using column to format a directory listing
Using column to format a directory listing


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: