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

Loops over files, runs a command, dumps output to a file
In this case I'm selecting all php files in a dir, then echoing the filename and piping it to ~/temp/errors.txt. Then I'm running my alias for PHPCS (WordPress flags in my alias), then piping the PHPCS output to grep and looking for GET. Then I'm piping that output to the same file as above. This gets a list of files and under each file the GET security errors for that file. Extrapolate this to run any command on any list of files and pipe the output to a file. Remove the >> ~/temp/errors.txt to get output to the screen rather than to a file.

Convert ascii string to hex

Use colordiff in side-by-side mode, and with automatic column widths.
Barely worth posting because it is so simple, but I use it literally all the time. I was always frustrated by the limitations that a non-gui environment imposes on diff'ing files. This fixes some of those limitations by colourising the output (you'll have to install colordiff, but it is just a wrapper for diff itself), using side-by-side mode for clearer presentation, and of course, the -W parameter, using tput to automatically insert you terminal width. Note that the double quotes aren't necessary if typed into terminal as-is. I included them for safety sake,

Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file
Say you're started "xzcat bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program >summary" an hour ago, and you of course forgot to enable progress output (you could've just put "awk 'NR%1000==0{print NR>"/dev/stderr"}{print}'" in the pipeline but it's too late for that now). But you really want some idea of how far along your program is. Then you can run the above command to see how many % along xzcat is in reading the file. Note that this is for the GNU/Linux version of lsof; the one found on e.g. Darwin has slightly different output so the awk part may need some tweaks.

remove hostname from known_hosts

Identify differences between directories (possibly on different servers)
This can be much faster than downloading one or both trees to a common servers and comparing the files there. After, only those files could be copied down for deeper comparison if needed.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Recursive cat - concatenate files (filtered by extension) across multiple subdirectories into one file
Useful if you have to put together multiple files into one and they are scattered across subdirectories. For example: You need to combine all .sql files into one .sql file that would be sent to DBAs as a batch script. You do get a warning if you create a file by the same extension as the ones your searching for. find . -type f -name *.sql -exec cat {} > BatchFile.txt \;

python2 -m CGIHTTPServer
In case you need to test some CGI scripts this does the job. It also has the functionality of a http server. Enjoy!

Extracting frames from a video as jpeg files
This command extracts 10 seconds worth of frames, starting from 00:15:45 position, from filename.avi and stores them into out_frames folder as jpeg files. Subtitles are turned off with -sid 999 option.


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: