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

Get a list of all your VirtualBox virtual machines by name and UUID from the shell
A similar command that lists only the currently running VMs is thus: $ VBoxManage list runningvms ...the above showing a list of VMs by name and UUID in the same format as the "$ VBoxManage list vms" command

Google text-to-speech in local language or language of choice
Google text-to-speech in your local language or in language of choice via country code switch (ISO 639-1).

Download all images from a site
This recursively downloads all images from a given website to your /tmp directory. The -nH and -nd switches disable downloading of the directory structure.

See system users

Rename files in batch

Make a DVD ISO Image from a VIDEO_TS folder on MacOSX
/path/ is the root folder of the DVD, not the VIDEO_TS folder.

ionice limits process I/O, to keep it from swamping the system (Linux)
This command is somewhat similar to 'nice', but constrains I/O usage rather than CPU usage. In particular, the '-c3' flag tells the OS to only allow the process to do I/O when nothing else is pending. This dramatically increases the responsiveness of the rest of the system if the process is doing heavy I/O. There's also a '-p' flag, to set the priority of an already-running process.

comment current line(put # at the beginning)

Save xkcd to a pdf with captions
Saves to a PDF with title and alt text of comic. As asked for on http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=91100 Change xkcd.com to dynamic.xkcd.com/comics/random for a random comic.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously


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: