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

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

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

Adding Prefix to File name
Adding course name prefix to lecture pdfs

Kill any lingering ssh processes
Also ignoring "sshd" server is necessary since you should not kill ssh server processes.

Easy file sharing from the command line using transfer.sh
Requires: curl xsel access to the internet(http://transfer.sh) This is an alias utilizing the transfer.sh service to make sharing files easier from the command line. I have modified the alias provided by transfer.sh to use xsel to copy the resulting URL to the clipboard. The full modified alias is as follows since commandlinefu only allows 255 characters: transfer() { if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then echo "No arguments specified. Usage:\necho transfer /tmp/test.md\ncat /tmp/test.md | transfer test.md"; return 1; fi if tty -s; then basefile=$(basename "$1" | sed -e 's/[^a-zA-Z0-9._-]/-/g'); curl --progress-bar --upload-file "$1" "https://transfer.sh/$basefile" |xsel --clipboard; else curl --progress-bar --upload-file "-" "https://transfer.sh/$1" |xsel --clipboard ; fi; xsel --clipboard; }

Solaris get PID socket
Command line to get which PID is opening a socket on IP and PORT. Only useful under Solaris.

Convert YAML to JSON
Converts YAML file to JSON. Note that you'll need to install PyYAML. Also some YAML data types (like dates) are not supported by JSON).

Easy Persistent SSH Connections Using Screen
Use as: $ s host1 Will ssh to remote host upon first invocation. Then use C-a d to detatch. Running "s host1" again will resume the shell session on the remote host. Only useful in LAN environment. You'd want to start the screen on the remote host over a WAN. Adapted from Hack 34 in Linux Server Hacks 2nd Addition.

Create a new file

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.


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: