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

Deploy git server repo
After, check if working by executing this command locally : git clone git@192.168.0.18:repositories/gitosis-admin.git Tutorial : http://blog.hemca.com/?p=560

A sorted summary of disk usage including hidden files and folders
Same result as with 'du -ks .[^.]* * | sort -n' but with size outputs in human readable format (e.g., 1K 234M 2G)

Show the date of easter
ncal -e shows the date of Easter this year. ncal -e YYYY shows the date of Easter in a given year. ncal -o works the same way, but for Orthodox dates.

Execute a command without saving it in the history
Prepending one or more spaces to your command won't be saved in history. Useful for pr0n or passwords on the commandline. Tested on BASH.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Easily find latex package documentation
If the pdf/dvi/etc documentation for a latex package is already part of your local texmf tree, then texdoc will find and display it for you. If the documentation is not available on your system, it will bring up the package's webpage at CTAN to help you investigate.

Get line number 12 (or n) from a file
Extracts only file number 12 from file. It's meant for text files. Replace 12 with the number you want. First line starts at 1 not 0. We use q on next line so doesn't process any line more.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

prevent accidents and test your command with echo
if you're using wildcards * or ? in your command, and if you're deleting, moving multiple files, it's always safe to see how those wildcards will expand. if you put "echo" in front of your command, the expanded form of your command will be printed. It's better safe than sorry.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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: