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

Destroy all disks on system simultaneously
This command will use the fdisk utility to find all block devices on your system, and overwrite them with data from the /dev/urandom non-blocking random number generator. CAUTION: This will irrevocably erase EVERY SINGLE physical block storage device visible to the fdisk utility, including plugged USB devices, RAID sets, LVM, etc.

list all file extensions in a directory
Works on current directory, with built-in sorting.

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

save man-page as pdf

Find the package that installed a command

Display a Lissajous curve in text
Use Ruby's standard Curses module to display a Lissajous curve in the console. Replace the "0.2" with different numbers for different curves.

Rename HTML files according to their title tag
The above one-liner could be run against all HTML files in a directory. It renames the HTML files based on the text contained in their title tag. This helped me in a situation where I had a directory containing thousands of HTML documents with meaningless filenames.

Concatenate (join) video files
Use mencoder to concatenate (join) multiple video files together.

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" }

prevent accidents while using wildcards
alternative for "echo rm *.txt". Just doubletab the command you are willing to use and it will show you the affected files.


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: