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

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Encode/Decode text to/from Base64 on a Mac w/out Mac Ports
I have a mac, and do not want to install mac ports to get the base64 binary. Using openssl will do the trick just fine. Note, to decode base64, specify a '-d' after 'base64' in the command. Note also the files base64.decoded.txt and base64.encoded.txt are text files.

find the rpm package name that provides a specific file
For Linux distributions using rpm (eg Mandriva), this command will find the rpm package name that provides a file.

Prepare B&W scans for clean looking, searchable PDF
Scan pages in, clean them up in an image editor, save to individual files. Use this command to convert each page to PDF. Combine in Acrobat Professional, and use the built-in OCR with the "Searchable Image (Exact)" option. Gives excellent image quality and file size (avoids awful JPEG image recompression that Acrobat and other OCR systems tend to do.)

Lets Tux say the random fact. [add it to .bashrc to see it in new terminal window]

Count the number of pages of all PDFs in current directory and all subdirs, recursively

Replace Caps-lock with Control-key
You can return to defaults with "setxkbmap". More here: http://dailycli.blogspot.com/2009/12/xmodmap-replace-caps-lock-with-left.html

Use Perl like grep
If you've ever tried "grep -P" you know how terrible it is. Even the man page describes it as "highly experimental". This function will let you 'grep' pipes and files using Perl syntax for regular expressions. The first argument is the pattern, e.g. '/foo/'. The second argument is a filename (optional).

List bash functions defined in .bash_profile or .bashrc
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2625783/listing-defined-functions-in-bash#2627461


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: