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

Find UTF-8 text files misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1 due to Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard.
Character: "?" is the Byte Order Mark (BOM) of the Unicode Standard. Specifically it is the hex bytes EF BB BF, which form the UTF-8 representation of the BOM, misinterpreted as ISO 8859/1 text instead of UTF-8.

Colorize matching string without skipping others
this is useful to highlight only some code without losing other lines (eg. software, logs, scripts)

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr

Dump snapshot of UFS2 filesystem, then gzip it
Opens a snapshot of a live UFS2 filesystem, runs dump to generate a full filesystem backup which is run through gzip. The filesystem must support snapshots and have a .snap directory in the filesystem root. To restore the backup, one can do $ zcat /path/to/adXsYz.dump.gz | restore -rf -

Rename files in batch

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Monitor bandwidth by pid
Nethogs is a useful tool for monitor bandwidth consumption by pid. Tested on Debian an CentOs

List last opened tabs in firefox browser

Prettify an XML file
Generated XML files often are poorly formatted. Use this command to properly indent and normalize the file in-place.

File browser
Simple file browser with dmenu, ls, and xdg-open.


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: