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

Using numsum to sum a column of numbers.
numsum is part of of the num-utils package, which is available in some Linux distros and can also be downloaded at http://suso.suso.org/xulu/Num-utils. It contains about 10 different programs for dealing with numbers from the command line. Obviously you can do a lot of things that the num-utils programs do in awk, sed, bash, perl scripts, but num-utils are there so that you don't have to remember the syntax for more complex operations and can just think: compute the sum, average, boundary numbers, etc.

Show all programs on UDP and TCP ports with timer information
-p PID and name of the program -u on a UDP port. -t also TCP ports -o networking timer -n numeric IP addresses (don't resolve them) -a all sockets

Download a numbered sequence of files

exec chmod to subfiles
Using `-exec cmd {} +` causes find to build the command using all matching filenames before execution, rather than once per file.

Output a list of svn repository entities to xml file
I use this to pull the last commit date for everything in my repo, so I can tell the client which files haven't been touched or updated since the repo was created. Another way to do it is to use svn log, but that does not pull the "kind" attribute. It does, however, give you the commit message. Both are very useful.

Get IPv4 of eth0 for use with scripts
Simple and easy. No regex, no search and replace. Just clean, built-in tools.

Check if *hardware* is 32bit or 64bit
This command tell you if your hardware is 32 or 64 bits even if you install a 32bits OS on a 64 bits hardware. If your distro don't support the -q switch, try doing : $ grep &>/dev/null '\' /proc/cpuinfo && echo 64 bits || echo 32 bits

Print diagram of user/groups
Parses /etc/group to "dot" format and pases it to "display" (imagemagick) to show a usefull diagram of users and groups (don't show empty groups).

Aptitude pattern match
Could be dangerous, if you have many packages all beginning with 'foo' or 'bar'. This will easily remove them all from your system.

Compress a series of png pictures to an avi movie.
cd /path/to/your/png_pics mencoder "mf://*.png" -mf fps=2 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 then you can get a movie named output.avi.


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: