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

Steve Reich - Piano Phase; interpreter: Bourne-Again Shell.
The Piano Phase piece, by Steve Reich is a minimalist composition which is played on two pianos played at slightly different tempos, a task that's very difficult to accomplish by human players. The auditive effects produced by the cell displacement produce beautiful patterns. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Phase . My rendered version: https://ydor.org/SteveReich/piano_phase.mp3 Requires sox to be installed on the system. There are multiple videos on youtube showing different approaches and experiences to this interpretation. There is also a synthesized version. Even if Bash can behave as a powerful pianist, a simple threaded version leaves full room to several time glitches and even negative displacements, the same issues that human pianists experience when playing the piece. The older the computer, the better the chaos added to the result due to the CPU load. Apparently that's the reason Steve Reich composes pieces such as this. Without further ado, please give a warm welcome to the Bash minimalist player on synthesized two-threaded pianos. Please turn off your cellphones.

Show a Package Version on Debian based distribution
if you don't want to show string "version?, then use awk or cut filter it: apt-cache show pkgname | grep -i "version:" | awk '{ print $2 }' we can also use regex to search many packages and show their versions: apt-cache search pkgregex | grep -i "version:"

ssh tunnel with auto reconnect ability

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

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.

Kill multiple instances of a running process

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

Zip a directory on Mac OS X and ignore .DS_Store (metadata) directory
If you want to generate a cross-platform compatible zip file and ignore the Finder's hidden metadata directory

Truncate 0.3 sec from an audio file using sox
Using this command one can cut a piece from the end of an audio file.

print first n characters of any file in human readble form using hexdump
Usefull to determine unknown file type


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: