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

docker kill all containers

Rename files with vim.
Opens a list of files in a text editor. Using Vim as your default editor allows you to use the power of regex substitution and visual block mode to batch rename files. Found in the renameutils package sudo apt-get install renameutils

Replicate a directory structure dropping the files
Here is how to replicate the directory structure in the current directory to a destination directory (given by the variable DESTDIR), without copying the files.

Securely destroy data on given device
Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

calulate established tcp connection of local machine
If you want prepend/append text just wrap in echo: $echo Connected: `netstat -an|grep -ci "tcp.*established"`

Directory Tree

List files size sorted and print total size in a human readable format without sort, awk and other commands.

Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

convert a web page into a pdf
This uses the "command-line print" plugin for Firefox (http://torisugari.googlepages.com/commandlineprint2). This same plugin can also produce PNGs. On *nix, the file must exist; therefore the touch bit in front. Also, firefox seems to ignore saved user preferences when "printing" this way (margins, header, footer, etc.), so I had to tweak my ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/prefs.js file by hand. Yup, that's *prefs.js* not user.js - apparently, firefox ignores my user.js file too...

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" }


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: