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

list files recursively by size

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.

generate a randome 10 character password

move contents of the current directory to the parent directory, then remove current directory.
Robust means of moving all files up by a directory. Will handle dot files, filenames containing spaces, and filenames with almost any printable characters. Will not handle filenames containing a single-quote (but if you are moving those, it's time to go yell at whoever created them in the first place).

Calculating series with awk: add numbers from 1 to 100
"seq 100" outputs 1,2,..,100, separated by newlines. awk adds them up and displays the sum. "seq 1 2 11" outputs 1,3,..,11. Variations: 1+3+...+(2n-1) = n^2 $ seq 1 2 19 | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}' # displays 100 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 1 $ seq 10 | awk '{sum+=1/(2**$1)} END {print sum}' # displays 0.999023

show ls colors with demo
This can show all ls colors, with a demo.

Quickly display a string as Qr Code
Takes the first argument (string) and display a Qr code version of that.

Show available conversions
aliases on each line. i.e. txt2html: $recode ..HTML file.html txt to Base64: $recode ../b64 file.b64 and so on.

Ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ip 100000 times with size 1024bytes


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: