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

Rename .JPG to .jpg recursively
This command is useful for renaming a clipart, pic gallery or your photo collection. It will only change the big caps to small ones (on the extension).

Symlink all files from a base directory to a target directory
Simple and easy to remember, if it already exists then it just ignores it.

get colorful side-by-side diffs of files in svn with vim
This will diff your local version of the file with the latest version in svn. I put this in a shell function like so: $svd() { vimdiff

"Clone" a list of installed packages from one Debian/Ubuntu Server to another

Show most common words in filenames
I'm sure there's a more elegant sed version for the tr + grep section.

Encrypt and password-protect execution of any bash script
(Please see sample output for usage) script.bash is your script, which will be crypted to script.secure script.bash --> script.secure You can execute script.secure only if you know the password. If you die, your script dies with you. If you modify the startup line, be careful with the offset calculation of the crypted block (the XX string). Not difficult to make script editable (an offset-dd piped to a gpg -d piped to a vim - piped to a gpg -c directed to script.new ), but not enough space to do it on a one liner.

Force GNU/Linux keyboard settings, layout and configuration
Bash snippet to force GNU/Linux keyboard settings, layout and configuration. Usefull when some GNU/Linux distributions such as *Ubuntu's store only limited configation options due to demonstration purposes on LiveUSB or Live persistent devices. Overcomes the English QWERTY to French AZERTY settings failure. Code bash en ligne de commande pour forcer l'adoption du clavier AZERTY sur les cl? USB bootable en Ubuntu.

duration of the DNS-query

Display the output of a command from the first line until the first instance of a regular expression.
If BREs can be used, this sed version will also get the job done.

translate what is in the clipboard in english and write it to the terminal


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: