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

Create a new file

Text message on wallpaper
Display some text on the wallpaper especially warning messages

list files recursively by size

Create sqlite db and store image
Creates a simple sqlite db (img.db) inserts /tmp/Q.jpg on base64 an recorvers it as /tmp/W.jpg

Compare two directory trees.
This uses Bash's "process substitution" feature to compare (using diff) the output of two different process pipelines.

Rip a DVD to AVI format
Substitute whatever track number you want into the "dvd://1" parameter. The "-aid 128" is to select the English language.

cpu and memory usage top 10 under Linux
The original version gives an error, here is the correct output

Copy a file from a remote server to your local box using on-the-fly compression
-P displays a progress meter -z tells rsync to use compression

Colorized JSON pretty printing
Uses pygmentize and python to create indented and colorized JSON output

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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: