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

Slow down the screen output of a command
(example above is the 'ls' command with reduced output speed)

View the latest astronomy picture of the day from NASA.
Substitute feh for the image viewer of your choice. display (part of imagemagick) seems to be a popular choice.

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL
Thanks to OpenSSL, you can quickly and easily generate MD5 hashes for your passwords. Alternative (thanks to linuxrawkstar and atoponce): $ echo -n 'text to be encrypted' | md5sum - Note that the above method does not utlise OpenSSL.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Keep one instance of an irc chat client in a screen session
This command attempts to attach to existing irssi session, if one exists, otherwise creates one. I use "irc" because I use different irc clients depending on what system I am working on. Consistency is queen.

bash auto-complete your screen sessions
this bash command sets it so that when you type "screen ", it searches your running screens, and present valid auto-complete choices. The output is . Note: You must have programmable completion enabled. Check with "shopt progcomp", set with "shopt -s progcomp"

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

Join lines split with backslash at the end
Joins each line that end with backslash (common way to mark line continuation in many languages) with the following one while removing the backslash.

Slow down the screen output of a command
(example above is the 'ls' command with reduced output speed)

Display a list of RPMs installed on a particular date
Find out which RPMs were installed on a particular date. These would (naturally) include update RPMs. This example shows searching for "Thu 05 Mar" (with grep). Alternatively, pipe it to less so you can search inside less (with less's neat text highlighting of the search term): rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} \"%{vendor}\" %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | less # (this example) search term: Thu 05 Mar


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: