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

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode

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.

Skip banner on ssh login prompt
This allows you to skip the banner (usually /etc/issue.net) on ssh connections. Useful to avoid banners outputted to your mail by rsync cronjobs.

find out how much space are occuipied by files smaller than 1024K (sic) - improved
The original didn't use -print0 which fails on weird file names eg with spaces. The original parsed the output of 'ls -l' which is always a bad idea.

Extract audio track from a video file using mencoder
Extracts an MP3 encoded audio stream from an input video file.

find duplicate processes
This command will allow to search for duplicate processes and sort them by their run count. Note that if there are same processes run by different users you'll see only one user in the result line, so you'll need to do: $ ps aux | grep to see all users that run this command.

Print the IPv4 address of a given interface

Mirror a directory structure from websites with an Apache-generated file indexes
wget/curl/friends are not good with mirroring files off websites, especially those with Apache-generated directory listings. These tools endlessly waste time downloading useless index HTML pages. lftp's mirror command does a better job without the mess.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Query an NFS host for its list of exports


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: