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

Print a list of installed Perl modules
This version works on an AIX system on which I have very limited permissions. The other version fails with "Can't open file /usr/opt/perl588/lib/site_perl/5.8.8/aix/auto/DBI/.packlist".

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

last.fm rss parser
you can just use one awk script to parse the rss feed. No need to pipe so many awk's and sed's. Its ugly and inefficient.

Get ElasticSearch configuration and version details
Replace localhost:9200 with your server location and port. This is the ElasticSearch's default setup for local instances.

Lists the size of certain file in every 10 seconds
watch is a command especially designed for doing this job

Create POSIX tar archive
tar(1) and cpio(1) are not fully platform agnostic, although their file formats are specified in POSIX.1-2001. As such, GNU tar(1) might not be able to extract a BSD tar(1) archive, and ivce versa. pax(1) is defined in POSIX.1-2001. To extract an archive: $ pax -rf archive.tar

get xclip to own the clipboard contents
"Copying" things to the X clipboard doesn't normally create a copy. Rather the data to be 'copied' is referenced. This means that if the application that you 'copied' stuff from is closed, that data is lost. If the application that you 'copied' from is suspended with CTRL-Z, there could be some issues if you try to paste it into something. This command will create a copy of referenced data and have xclip be the provider of it, so you can then go ahead and close the app that contains the original information. Caveat: I'm not sure if this is binary-safe (though i would expect it to be), and don't know what would happen if you used it to clip a 20 meg gimp image. This technique becomes more convenient if you set it up as an action in a clipboard manager (eg klipper, parcellite). Some of these applets can take automatic action based on a variety of parameters, so you could probably just get it to always own the clipped data whenever data is clipped.

Print today's date in ISO format without calling an external command (bash 4)

Edit a google doc with vim
Google just released a new commend line tool offering all sorts of new services from the commend line. One of them is uploading a youtube video but there are plenty more google services to interact with. Download it here: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/ Manual: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/wiki/Manual This specific command courtesy of lifehacker:http://lifehacker.com/5568817/ Though all can be found in manual page linked above.

Unrar all multipart rar archives in directory


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: