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

Compare a remote file with a local file
Useful for checking if there are differences between local and remote files.

Clear history

Grab just the title of a youtube video
There's another version on here that uses GET but some people don't have lwp-request, so here's an alternative. It's also a little shorter and should work with most youtube URLs since it truncates at the first &

Create an easy to pronounce shortened URL from CLI
Just add this function to your .zshrc / .bashrc, and by typing "shout *URL*" you get a randomly chosen English word that ShoutKey.com uses to short your URL. You may now go to shoutkey.com/*output_word* and get redirected. The URL will be valid for 5 minutes. (I've never used sed before, so I'll be quite glad if someone could straighten up the sed commands and combine them (perhaps also removing the whitespace). If so, I'll update it right away ;) )

Read aloud a text file in Ubuntu (and other Unixes with espeak installed

processes per user counter
No need for sort

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript
Remove security from PDF document using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need ghostscript for this baby to work.

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

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

Rename files in batch


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: