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

Bash scripts encryption and passphrase-protection
This function will encrypt a bash script and will only execute it after providing the passphrase. Requires mcrypt to be installed on the system.

Virtual Console lock program
vlock command locks the current console by default. Also you can lock all the consoles on the server by using -a parameter. For details, pl man vlock. ps: Generally speaking , system will not install vlock programme . So you should use ' $ sudo apt-get install vlock ' to install vlock .

Fetch the current human population of Earth
They are using json now

LDAP search to query an ActiveDirectory server
These are the parameters to ldapsearch (from ldap-utils in Ubuntu), for searching for the record for Joe Blogg's user. sAMAccountName is the LDAP field that ActiveDirectory uses to store the user name. 'DOMAIN\Joe.Bloggs' where "DOMAIN" is the the active directory domain. Othewise you could use "CN=Joe.Bloggs,DC=example,DC=com" instead of "DOMAIN\Joe.Bloggs"

Open a manpage in the default (graphical) web browser
An easy alias for opening a manpage, nicely HTML formatted, in your set internet browser. If you get a "command exited with status 3" error you need to install groff.

Google text-to-speech in mp3 format
EDIT: command updated to support accented characters! Works in any of 58 google supported languages (some sound like crap, english is the best IMO). You get a mp3 file containing your query in spoken language. There is a limit of 100 characters for the "q" parameter, so be careful. The "tl" parameter contains target language.

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)

April Fools' Day Prank
Add this to a fiend's .bashrc. PROMPT_COMMAND will run just before a prompt is drawn. RANDOM will be between 0 and 32768; in this case, it'll run about 1/10th of the time. \033 is the escape character. I'll call it \e for short. \e7 -- save cursor position. \e[%d;%dH -- move cursor to absolute position \e[4%dm \e[m -- draw a random color at that point \e8 -- restore position.

View all date formats, Quick Reference Help Alias
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command. # creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com $ ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com' $ # /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10 # create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory $ tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g'

Open a manpage in the default (graphical) web browser
An easy alias for opening a manpage, nicely HTML formatted, in your set internet browser. If you get a "command exited with status 3" error you need to install groff.


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: