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

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" }

Rename a file with a random name
Give files a random name (don't ask why :-) The function will rename files but maintain their extensions. BUG: If a file doesn't have an extension it will end up with a dot at the end of the name. The parameter '8' for pwgen controls the length of filenames - eight random characters.

Download full FLAC albums from archive.org
The only zipped version of an album available for download is the lossy mp3 version. To download lossless files, because of their size, you must download them individually. This command scrapes the page for all the FLAC (or also SHN) files.

Instead of writing a multiline if/then/else/fi construct you can do that by one line
instead of writing: if [[ "$1" == "$2" ]]; then echo "$1 is equal $2" else echo "$1 differs from $2" fi do write: [[ "$1" == "$2" ]] && echo "$1 is equal $2" || echo "$1 differs from $2"

Count number of files in a directory

Salvage a borked terminal
If you bork your terminal by sending binary data to STDOUT or similar, you can get your terminal back using this command rather than killing and restarting the session. Note that you often won't be able to see the characters as you type them.

Sort and count subjects of emails stuck in Exim queue

Blackhole any level zones via dnsmasq
Explanation It creates dnsmasq-com-blackhole.conf file with one line to route all domains of com zones to 0.0.0.0 You might use "address=/home.lab/127.0.0.1" to point allpossiblesubdomains.home.lab to your localhost or some other IP in a cloud.

Create a bunch of dummy files for testing
Sometimes I need to create a directory of files to operate on to test out some commandlinefu I am cooking up. The main thing is the range ({1..N}) expansion.

Display all readline binding that use CTRL
Useful for getting to know the available keyboard shortcuts.


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: