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 all the files more than 10MB, sort in descending order of size and record the output of filenames and size in a text file.
This command specifies the size in Kilobytes using 'k' in the -size +(N)k option. The plus sign says greater than. -exec [cmd] {} \; invokes ls -l command on each file and awk strips off the values of the 5th (size) and the 9th (filename) column from the ls -l output to display. Sort is done in reversed order (descending) numerically using sort -rn options. A cron job could be run to execute a script like this and alert the users if a dir has files exceeding certain size, and provide file details as well.

Prints new content of files
Useful to e.g. keep an eye on several logfiles.

List files with full path
Prints contents of current directory with the full path prepended to each entry. You can add '-type f' if you don't want the directories to show up (for those less familiar with find). I can't believe ls doesn't have an option for this.

sends a postscript file to a postscript printer using netcat

determine if a shared library is compiled as 32bit or 64bit
Determines the flavor of a shared library by looking at the addresses of its exposed functions and seeing if they are 16 bytes or 8 bytes long. The command is written so the library you are querying is passed to a variable up font -- it would be simple to convert this to a bash function or script using this format.

Rsync a directory excluding pesky .svn dirs

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

Capture video of a linux desktop

Broadcast your shell thru ports 5000, 5001, 5002 ...
run 'nc yourip 5000', 'nc yourip 5001' or 'nc yourip 5002' elsewhere will produce an exact same mirror of your shell. This is handy when you want to show someone else some amazing stuff in your shell without giving them control over it.

List processes playing sound
When trying to play a sound you may sometimes get an error saying that your sound card is already used, but not by what process. This will list all processes playing sound, useful to kill processes that you no longer need but that keep using your sound card.


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: