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

Most used command

format txt as table not joining empty columns
-n switch keeps empty columns If your distribution does not ship with a recent column version that supports -n you can use this alternative: perl -pe 's/(^|;);/$1 ;/g' file.csv | column -ts\; | less -S Change the delimiter to your liking.

Get curenttly playing track in Last.fm radio

scheduled jobs

List files by quoting or escaping special characters.
Tested and works on Linux.

Do one ping to a URL, I use this in a MRTG gauge graph to monitor connectivity

Force an fsck on reboot
Force an fsck on reboot. Useful on a system where / has mounted read-only because of file system issues.

Show git branches by date - useful for showing active branches
This fixes a bug found in the other scripts which fail when a branch has the same name as a file or directory in the current directory.

Mount/unmount your truecrypted file containers
This should automatically mount it to /media/truecrypt1. Further mounts will go to /media/truecrypt2, and so on. You shouldn't need sudo/su if your permissions are right. I alias tru='truecrypt' since tr and true are commands. To explicitly create a mount point do: tru volume.tc /media/foo To make sure an GUI explorer window (nautilus, et al) opens on the mounted volume, add: --explorer To see what you currently have mounted do: tru -l To dismount a volume do: tru -d volume.tc. To dismount all mounted volumes at once do: tru -d Tested with Truecrypt v6.3a / Ubuntu 9.10

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: