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

urldecoding with one pure BASH builtin
You can use ordinary printf to convert "%23%21%2fbin%2fbash" into "#!/bin/bash" with no external utilities, by using a little known printf feature -- the "%b" specifier converts shell escapes. Replace % with \x and printf will understand the urlencoded string. BASH's printf has an extension to set a variable directly, too. So you get to convert urlencoded strings from garble to plaintext in one step with no externals and no backticks.

List the number and type of active network connections

Find the package that installed a command

Use last argument of last command
Bash shortcut to work with the last argument of your last command

Fast, built-in pipe-based data sink
This is shorter and actually much faster than >/dev/null (see sample output for timings) Plus, it looks like a disappointed face emoticon.

Use CreationDate metadata on .mov files to rename and modify the created/modify file dates on Mac

du command without showing other mounted file systems

Trim png files in a folder
That should be a short as it can get.

Rename files in batch

Binary clock
cryptic version


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: