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

escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

RELINK a lot of broken symlinks - FIX broken symlinks after rsync site to new server
After you run this script, you can check status for broken symlink with this command: find -L . -type l

Mac OS X: remove extra languages to save over 3 GB of space.
This will get the job done in the most efficient way - spawning only one `rm` process. "On-the-fly" find data is displayed through `tee` and you should have plenty of time to ctrl-c if needed before it's too late. You may need to re-run this after major Software Updates. To leave more languages in, add more ``-and \! -iname "lang*"'' statements: $ sudo find / -iname "*.lproj" -and \! -iname "en*" -and \! -iname "spanish*" -print0 | tee /dev/stderr | sudo xargs -0 rm -rfv **Edit: note the 2nd sudo near the end of the pipeline - this is necessary.

du command without showing other mounted file systems

Execute a command with a timeout
I like much more the perl solution, but without using perl. It launches a backgroup process that will kill the command if it lasts too much. A bigger function: check_with_timeout() { [ "$DEBUG" ] && set -x COMMAND=$1 TIMEOUT=$2 RET=0 # Launch command in backgroup [ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 6>&2 # Link file descriptor #6 with stderr. [ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 2> /dev/null # Send stderr to null (avoid the Terminated messages) $COMMAND 2>&1 >/dev/null & COMMAND_PID=$! [ "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Background command pid $COMMAND_PID, parent pid $$" # Timer that will kill the command if timesout sleep $TIMEOUT && ps -p $COMMAND_PID -o pid,ppid |grep $$ | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill & KILLER_PID=$! [ "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Killer command pid $KILLER_PID, parent pid $$" wait $COMMAND_PID RET=$? # Kill the killer timer [ "$DEBUG" ] && ps -e -o pid,ppid |grep $KILLER_PID | awk '{print $1}' | xargs echo "Killing processes: " ps -e -o pid,ppid |grep -v PID | grep $KILLER_PID | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill wait sleep 1 [ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 2>&6 6>&- # Restore stderr and close file descriptor #6. return $RET }

Increase mplayer maximum volume
use '0' and '9' to increase/decrease volume. this is useful on laptops with low speaker volume.

HTTP GET request on wireshark remotly

Quickly create simple text file from command line w/o using vi/emacs
1. Issue command 2. After angled bracket appears, enter file contents 3. When done, type "EOF"

Show a notify popup in Gnome that expires in specified time and does not leave an icon in notifications tray
Tested in Gnome 3.4

Limit the cpu usage of a process
Similar to `cpulimit`, although `prlimit` can be found shipped with recent util-linux. Example: limit CPU consumption to 10% for a math problem which ordinarily takes up 100% CPU: Before: $ bc -l


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: