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

urldecoding
$ echo "http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com" | sed -e's/%\([0-9A-F][0-9A-F]\)/\\\\\x\1/g' | xargs echo -e http://www.google.com $ Works under bash on linux. just alter the '-e' option to its corresponding equivalence in your system to execute escape characters correctly.

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Matrix Style
Unlike other alternatives, this command only relies on bash builtins and should also work on windows platforms with the bash executable. Sparseness corresponds to the number 128 and can be adjusted. To print all possible digits instead of only 0 and 1 replace RANDOM%2 by RANDOM%10 or RANDOM%16 to add letters [A-F].

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

True Random Dice Roll
/dev/urandom is cryptographically secure, and indistinguishable from true random, as it gathers data from external sources, influenced by human timing interactions with computers, to fill the entropy pool, and hashes the input with SHA-1. As such, this is a quick way to do a "true random" fair-6 dice roll. Using this method, you could easily create passphrases with Diceware http://diceware.com. Change the head(1) count to something other than 5 for more or less numbers.

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Watch the progress of 'dd'
The previously-posted one-liner didn't work for me for whatever reason, so I ended up doing this instead.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Random IPv4 address

convert MTS video file format into xvid/mp3 avi format


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: