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

Extract audio from Mythtv recording to Rockbox iPod using ffmpeg
There are some pretty good live performances on late night TV. With Mythtv I record David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Conan nightly all in HD from over the air broadcasts. If I find a live performance I like I copy it to my Rockboxed iPod using this command. The Rockbox firmware knows how to downmix 5.1 audio. The command above extracts the audio from the video starting at 58 minutes and 15 seconds. It ends at the end of the file since this was the last performance of the recording. The command creates an ac3 file. I copy the ac3 file to my Rockbox iPod and rock on.

generate random mac address

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Terminate a frozen SSH-session
A key sequence for terminating a frozen session. Full sequence on a swedish keyboard: [ENTER] [ALTGR] tilde [SPACE] dot

Print compile time in seconds package by package (Gentoo Distros)

Make a thumbnail image of first page of a PDF.
convert is included in ImageMagick. Don't forget the [X] (where X is the page number). [0] is the first page of the PDF.

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
Change to your taste. Much quicker than having to add 'cd' every time. Add it to your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

get a random command
This command will show an random command. this is useful if you want to explore various random commands.

escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command


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: