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

Preserve user variables when running commands with sudo.
In this case the current user has proxy variable set which allows access to the rpm on the internet but needs root privs to install it. Running sudo -E preserves the current user proxy var and allows the rpm install to be executed with sudo.

create an screenshot, upload it to your server via scp and then open that screenshot in firefox
I often need to send screenshots to other people to explain settings and whatever. So I created this oneline which I use to create the screenshot with imagemagik, upload it via scp to my server and then the command opens an firefox tab with the screenshot. The screenshot can be a region or a window. You just have to replace the parts beginning with YOUR.

formatting number with comma
it is not work with Cygwin's bash3.X. Test in Linux. use printf "%'f" number while it is floating point number

count total number of lines of ruby code
Adapted from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1358540/how-to-count-all-the-lines-of-code-in-a-directory-recursively#answer-1359246

doing some floating point math

An easter egg built into python to give you the Zen of Python

RTFM function
Simple edit to work for OSX. Now just add this to your ~/.profile and `source ~/.profile`

play high-res video files on a slow processor
Certain codecs in high res don't play so well on my Dell Mini 9. Using this command, I can play just about anything and it keeps the sound in sync to boot!

Get your external IP address if your machine has a DNS entry
Easy way to see your real external IP

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"


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: