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

Record audio and video from webcam using mencoder
Record audio to MP3 stream and video to MPEG-4 stream from webcam to AVI file using mencoder. Gives floating point exception in some mencoder versions.

On Screen micro display for battery and CPU temperature. nifty, small, omnipresent
My firefox overheats my cpu, sometimes above 90 degrees Celsius ( hence the name? ) To keep an eye on temperature, I put this command inside KAlarm ( a kind of cron) to be repeated every minute, for 5 seconds, color red ( default for osd_cat). Its pretty, ultra small, displays a micro 2 lines text on every desktop and over everything and do not steal focus or interrupt any task. I get the information passively, in the low profile bottom of the screen. Of course you can use it inside a terminal. Just do it: watch -n 60 'acpi -t | osd_cat -p bottom'

drill holes on image

Download and install the OpenStore on the Ubuntu Phone
This will download and install the latest version of the open store on the ubuntu phone, this store includes unconfined applications such as the TweakGeek and the Ubuntu Touch Tweak Tool. You can see the install instructions from here: https://open.uappexplorer.com/docs#install

Displays the number of unread messages on your gmail at the top right corner of your terminal
Checks your gmail account every 30 seconds and display the number of new messages in the top right corner of the terminal. A kind of CLI "Gmail notifier" if you will. :-) This is a mashup of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/7916/put-a-console-clock-in-top-right-corner and http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3386/check-your-unread-gmail-from-the-command-line

Do a command but skip recording it in the bash command history
Note the extra space before the command (I had to put it as an underscore since the website eats up preceding spaces). That's all it takes. Now if you check your history with "$ history", it wont show up.

Increment the filename of png in a given directory by one

Find files and list them sorted by modification time
This uses the ability of find (at least the one from GNU findutils that is shiped with most linux distros) to display change time as part of its output. No xargs needed.

Display condensed log of changes to current git repository
Assuming you are working within a git repository, you can run the above command & see what has changed in reverse chronological order, with one commit per line. Other formatting variations to 'oneline' include 'short', 'medium', 'full', 'fuller', 'email' or 'raw'.

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.


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: