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

shutdown pc in 4 hours without needing to keep terminal open / user logged in.
This way, you can specify how many hours in which you want your machine to shut down.

Instant mirror from your laptop + webcam
Flips the y-axis to emulate a real mirror, uses low resolution for speed, this will also hide blemishes and the like :)

Remove everything except that file
Remove everything except that file with shell tricks inside a subshell to avoid changes in the environment. $ help shopt

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word passphrase (fast)
Some snippets posted are slow on big dictionaries, this one is fast.

See system users

Watch the progress of 'dd'
need pv (pipe view) : http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml

command line Google I'm Feeling Lucky
opens the Google I'm Feeling Lucky result in lynx, the command line browser

Printout a list of field numbers (awk index) from a CSV file with headers as first line.
Useful to identify the field number in big CSV files with large number of fields. The index is the reference to use in processing with commands like 'cut' or 'awk' involved.

Change prompt to MS-DOS one (joke)

Virtualbox: setup hardware
where - memory 256 assign 256 Mb RAM - acpi on enable ACPI (mandatory if you use Winfog 2000 - ioapic off disable the IO APIC. Not useful if you use one CPU (on virtual machine or a 32 bit operative system). As ACPI, this switch is mandatory for Winbug 2000 - pae on enable the Phisical Address Extension how to use more than 4Gb of RAM on x86 CPU - hwvirtex on enables hardware virtualization extensions for microprocessors that have this feature (which should be also enabled in the BIOS of the motherboard) - nestedpaging on allows part of the processes of memory management hardware are made directly


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: