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

climagic's New Year's Countdown clock
This is the 140 character long new year's countdown timer that was posted to the climagic account on twitter and identi.ca. There are saner ways of doing this of course, but probably none of those would fit. Uses the figlet command, but of course you can replace figlet with just echo if you want.

Count to 65535 in binary (for no apparent reason)
Yes, it's useless.

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Yet another way to add a line at the top a of text file with the help of the tac command (reverse cat).

recursively change file name from uppercase to lowercase (or viceversa)
or, to process a single directory: $ for f in *; do mv $f `echo $f |tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; done

Create a local compressed tarball from remote host directory
The command uses ssh(1) to get to a remote host, uses tar(1) to archive a remote directory, prints the result to STDOUT, which is piped to gzip(1) to compress to a local file. In other words, we are archiving and compressing a remote directory to our local box.

svn diff colorized
If colordiff utility installed, it is sometimes handy to call this command. Of course, you should create an alias for it. E.g. svndiff.

copy audio file from playlist to a floder
copy some file from xx.m3u to target folder

Remount a usb disk in Gnome without physically removing and reinserting
Remounts a usb disk /dev/sdb, without having to physically remove and reinsert. (Gnome desktop)

Run a command, redirecting output to a file, then edit the file with vim.
This is one of those 'nothing' shell functions ...which I use all the time. If the command contains spaces, it must be quoted, e.g. $ vimcmd 'svn diff' /tmp/svndiff.out If I want to keep the output of the command that I'm running, I use vimcmd. If I don't need to keep the output, I use this: $ vim

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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: