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 me yesterday's date, even if today is 1-Mar-2008 and yesterday was 29-Feb-2008
Fool date by setting the timezone out by 24 hours and you get yesterday's date. Try TZ=XYZ-24 to get tomorrow's date. I live in TZ=GMT0BST so you might need to shift the number 24 by the hours in your timezone.

Change host name
With sed you can replace strings on the fly.

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available

Emulating netcat -e (netcat-traditional or netcat-openbsd) with the gnu-netcat
Then just nc servername 2600 and ./script.sh kill the client with ctrl+c. You can reconnect several times. kill the server with exit

Donwload media from *.rm from an url of type htttp://.../*.ram

chmod - change file permissions of a file to be similar of another

Run a command for a given time
or "Execute a command with a timeout" Run a command in background, sleep 10 seconds, kill it. $! is the process id of the most recently executed background command. You can test it with: find /& sleep10; kill $!

See where a shortened url takes you before click

Create strong, but easy to remember password
Why remember? Generate! Up to 48 chars, works on any unix-like system (NB: BSD use md5 instead of md5sum)

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him


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: