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 movie length

Rename all files in a directory to the md5 hash

Read aloud a text file in Ubuntu (and other Unixes with espeak installed

What is the use of this switch ?
Find the usage of a switch with out searching through the entire man page. Usage: manswitch [cmd] [switch] Eg: $manswitch grep silent ____________________________ In simple words $man | grep "\-" Eg: $man grep | grep "\-o" This is not a standard method but works.

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

print text in color red
eg: $printTextInColorRed foo bar foo bar [in red color]

Recursive cat - concatenate files (filtered by extension) across multiple subdirectories into one file
Useful if you have to put together multiple files into one and they are scattered across subdirectories. For example: You need to combine all .sql files into one .sql file that would be sent to DBAs as a batch script. You do get a warning if you create a file by the same extension as the ones your searching for. find . -type f -name *.sql -exec cat {} > BatchFile.txt \;

Print info about your real user.
To get your effective user: whoami

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

Count lines in a file with grep
Returns the number of lines in a file, emulates "wc -l" behavior with grep.


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: