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

setup a tunnel from destination machine port 80 to localhost 2001, via a second (hub) machine.
this is handy when the hubmachine is the only machine that can connect to the destination machine (allowed on ip by firewall) and you want to access it from your laptop.

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" }

For Gentoo users : helping with USE / emerge
This command puts all the flags of the USE variable actually used by the packages you emerged to the file "use", and those which are unused but available to the file "notuse"

need ascii art pictures for you readme text ?
Require boxes and / or cowsay packages. After input boxes -d dog , type your text and then press ctrl + d . Same goes for cowsay .

Display current bandwidth statistics
ifstat, part of ifstat package, is a tool for displaying bandwidth and other statistics. The -n option avoid to display header periodically, the -t option put a timestamp at the beginning of the line. Works for me on Debian and CentOS

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Print a date from 3 days ago
This command prints the Date (Not time) from 3 days ago (72 hours ago). This works on systems without GNU date (MacOSX , Solaris, FreeBSD).

Mount a truecrypt drive from a file from the command line interactively
It seems to completely void the benefit of having an encrypted folder if you then have a script on your unencrypted hard drive with your password in it. This command will mount a truecrypt file at a given mount point after asking you for the password.

Recall “N”th command from your BASH history without executing it.

Read random news on the internet
sort -R randomize the list. head -n1 takes the first.


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: