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

Convert control codes to visible Unicode Control Pictures
Converts control codes and spaces (ASCII code ≤ 32) to visible Unicode Control Pictures, U+2400 ? U+2420. Skips \n characters, which is probably a good thing.

iso to USB with dd and show progress status
need package: pv apt-get install pv get the iso size in byte with ls -l install-cd.iso /dev/sdb is your USB Device (without partitionNr.)

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Which files/dirs waste my disk space
I added -S to du so that you don't include /foo/bar/baz.iso in /foo, and change sorts -n to -h so that it can properly sort the human readable sizes.

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

Show total disk space on all partitions
show off how big your disks are

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

List dot-files and dirs, but not . or ..

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Using xargs is better than: $ find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \; as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.

Realtime lines per second in a log file
Displays the realtime line output rate of a logfile. -l tels pv to count lines -i to refresh every 10 seconds -l option is not in old versions of pv. If the remote system has an old pv version: ssh tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | pv -l -i10 -r >/dev/null


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: