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

Get a file from SharePoint with cURL
If you know the URL of a file on a SharePoint server, it's just a matter of logging in with your AD credentials to get the file with cURL

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Robust expansion (i.e. crash) of bash variables with a typo
By default bash expands an unbound variable to an empty string. This can be dangerous, if a critical variable name (a path prefix for example) has a typo. The -u option causes bash to treat this as an error, and the -e option causes it to exit in case of an error. These two together will make your scripts a lot safer against typos. The default behaviour can be explicitly requested using the ${NAME:-} syntax. A (less explicit) variation: #!/bin/bash -eu

What is my ip?

Quickly find a count of how many times invalid users have attempted to access your system

display typedefs, structs, unions and functions provided by a header file
will display typedefs, structs, unions and functions declared in 'stdio.h'(checkout _IO_FILE structure). It will be helpful if we want to know what a particular header file will offer to us. Command 'cpp' is GNU's C Preprocessor.

Recompress all text files in a subdirectory with lzma
This will deal nicely with filenames containing newlines and will run one lzma process per CPU core. It requires GNU Parallel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

diff directories, quick cut and paste to view the changes
We use this to quickly highlight differences and provide a quick way to cut and paste the command to view the files using the marvellous vimdiff

Check which files are opened by Firefox then sort by largest size.
Check which files are opened by Firefox then sort by largest size (in MB). You can see all files opened by just replacing grep to "/". Useful if you'd like to debug and check which extensions or files are taking too much memory resources in Firefox.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.


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: