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

Recursive chmod all *.sh files within the current directory
This command is useful to recursively make executable all "*.sh" files in a folder. This command is useful to apply chmod recursively in a determined kind of file.

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

Connect via SSH to VirtualBox guest VM without knowing IP address
Booting the VM headless via VBoxHeadless requires knowledge of the VM's network in order to connect. Using VBoxManage in this way and you can SSH to the VM without first looking up the current IP, which changes depending on how you have your VM configured.

Run a bash script in debug mode, show output and save it on a file

Follow the most recently updated log files
This command finds the 5 (-n5) most frequently updated logs in /var/log, and then does a multifile tail follow of those log files. Alternately, you can do this to follow a specific list of log files: sudo tail -n0 -f /var/log/{messages,secure,cron,cups/error_log}

tail a log over ssh
This is also handy for taking a look at resource usage of a remote box. $ ssh -t remotebox top

Google URL shortener
Shorter and made into a function.

ASCII webcam live stream video using mplayer
Mplayer starts a webcam capture using ASCII art. Only mplayer required

Display text as though it is being typed out in real time
Pipe Viewer allows you to monitor the progress of a data transfer or command, or to show the time elapsed, among other things. In this use, it limits the transfer rate of the echo command to 10 bytes per second, making your text appear to be typed out in real time as in Hollywood movies. Fun!

redirect stdout and stderr each to separate files and print both to the screen


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: