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

show the difference

Open Finder from the current Terminal location
I did not know this, i'd like to share...

Read almost everything (Changelog.gz, .tgz, .deb, .png, .pdf, etc, etc....)
It allows customizing by means of lesspipe. You need to write a ~/.lessfilter script and put this into your ~/.bashrc: eval $(lesspipe) export LESS=-r

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Alert visually until any key is pressed
I learned a few things reading this command. But I did run into a few issues: 1. On systems that don't use GNU echo (e.g. macOS 10.14.5 Mojave), the e option may not be supported. In this case ANSI escape codes will echoed as text and the terminal will not flash, like this: \e[?5h\e[38;5;1m A L E R T Thu Jun 20 16:31:29 PDT 2019 2. Since the read command strips\ignores leading backslashes, if a user types the backslash character once in the loop, it will not break. Typing backslash twice in a loop will break as expected. 3. The foreground color is set to red (\e[38;5;1m) on every loop. This could be set once before we call while, and then reset once when the loop breaks. 4. Instead of resetting the foreground color when it breaks, the video mode is set back to normal (\e[?5l). This has the effect of leaving the terminal text red until it is manually reset. The alternative I'm proposing here addresses these issues. I tested it on macOS and Arch Linux.

a shell function to print a ruler the width of the terminal window.
A similar version for Bash that doesn't require cut and shortens the function in a few places. And it uses local variables. (similar to a version by eightmillion in a comment on the another version)

bash auto-complete your screen sessions
this bash command sets it so that when you type "screen ", it searches your running screens, and present valid auto-complete choices. The output is . Note: You must have programmable completion enabled. Check with "shopt progcomp", set with "shopt -s progcomp"

List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu)
dpigs is in the package debian-goodies (debian/ubuntu)

List all information about all files (in current dir)
This is a funny usage of the traditional command ls. It could be basically simplified as: $ ls -a -l Duplicating arguments is permitted: $ ls -a -l -l And this markup could be shortened as: $ ls -al Extra note: To view filesizes like a pro, pray for your God: $ ls -allah

Start a command on only one CPU core
This is useful if you have a program which doesn't work well with multicore CPUs. With taskset you can set its CPU affinity to run on only one core.


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: