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

Stop and continue processing on a terminal
This will send the ASCII sequence for DC3 to the currently running tty which results in SIGSTOP (19). You can continue with ASCII sequence for DC1 by pressing CTRL+q which results in SIGCONT (18).

move messages directly from one IMAP inbox to another
This one-liner was useful in helping someone I know to get off of MS Exchange. `mailutil` proved to be a much better alternative than `fetchmail` or `getmail` in this case. It quickly moved all mails to the destination server (a simple Dovecot/Maildir setup), with no need to convert back and forth between mbox/maildir on the user's own system.

Search and Replace across multiple files
- grep for the word in a files, use recursion (to find files in sub directories), and list only file matches -| xargs passes the results from the grep command to sed -sed -i uses a regular expression (regex) to evaluate the change: s (search) / search word / target word / g (global replace)

Short Information about loaded kernel modules

How to copy CD/DVD into hard disk (.iso)
A dear friend of mine asked me how do I copy a DVD to your hard drive? If you want to make a copy of the ISO image that was burned to a CD or DVD, insert that medium into your CD/DVD drive and (assuming /dev/cdrom is associated with your computer?s CD drive) type the following command

Use ImageMagick to get an image's properties

Split lossless audio (ape, flac, wav, wv) by cue file
Do you have an entire album in a unique file and want to split it in individual tracks? If you also have the cue file you can do it! Packages for Debian-based systems users: * cuetools shntool * FLAC (.flac): flac * WavPack (.wv): wavpack * Monkey's Audio (.ape): libmac2 monkeys-audio (deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sid main) NOTE: "sid" packages are unstable, but I didn't have problems with them. If you prefer, use the "stable" version repository. To transfer the tags, you can use this (works with .flac, .ogg and .mp3): $ cuetag sample.cue split-track*.flac

Fork bomb (don't actually execute)
Retrieved from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_bomb More info: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/991142/how-does-this-bash-fork-bomb-work

Speaking alarm clock
This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P

Programmatic way to find and set your timezone


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: