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 seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Find the package that installed a command

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).

Parse a quoted .csv file
The $2, $3, $4 fields are arbitrary but note that the first field starts from $2 and the last field is $NF-1. This is due to the fact that the leading and trailing quotes are treated as field delimiters.

Ring the system bell after finishing a long script/compile
This will ring the system bell once if your script exits successfully and twice if it fails. So you can go look at something else and it will alert you when done. Don't forget to use 'xset b [vol [pitch [duration]]]' to get the bell to sound the way you want.

prevent accidents while using wildcards
alternative for "echo rm *.txt". Just doubletab the command you are willing to use and it will show you the affected files.

Perl oneliner to print access rights in octal format
This prints file access rights in octal - useful when "stat" is unavailable.

Convert Shell Text to Upper/Lower Case

Alert visually until any key is pressed
I learned a few things reading this command. But I did run into a few issues: 1. On systems that don't use GNU echo (e.g. macOS 10.14.5 Mojave), the e option may not be supported. In this case ANSI escape codes will echoed as text and the terminal will not flash, like this: \e[?5h\e[38;5;1m A L E R T Thu Jun 20 16:31:29 PDT 2019 2. Since the read command strips\ignores leading backslashes, if a user types the backslash character once in the loop, it will not break. Typing backslash twice in a loop will break as expected. 3. The foreground color is set to red (\e[38;5;1m) on every loop. This could be set once before we call while, and then reset once when the loop breaks. 4. Instead of resetting the foreground color when it breaks, the video mode is set back to normal (\e[?5l). This has the effect of leaving the terminal text red until it is manually reset. The alternative I'm proposing here addresses these issues. I tested it on macOS and Arch Linux.

Find status of all symlinks
The symlinks command can show status of all symbolic links, including which links are dangling, which symlinks point to files on other file systems, which symlinks use ../ more than necessary, which symlinks are messy (e.g. having too many slashes or dots), etc. Other useful things it can do include removing all dangling links (-d) and converting absolute links to relative links (-c). The path given must be an absolute path (which is why I used $(pwd) in the example command).


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: