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

Reduce PDF size

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Alternative size (human readable) of files and directories (biggest last)
using mb it's still readable;) a symbol variation $ du -ms {,.[^.]}* | sort -nk1

Instead of writing a multiline if/then/else/fi construct you can do that by one line
instead of writing: if [[ "$1" == "$2" ]]; then echo "$1 is equal $2" else echo "$1 differs from $2" fi do write: [[ "$1" == "$2" ]] && echo "$1 is equal $2" || echo "$1 differs from $2"

Creates PodFeeds.txt, a file that lists the URLs of rhythmbox podcasts from the rhythmdb.xml file.
The first grep any line with pod-feed in it plus the following five lines. The second grep throws out any line not containing . sed removes the leading four spaces then and the trailing . Using a colon as sed's separating character avoids having to escape the /. Works ok with Mythbuntu 9.04 (used mostly as a three line bash script).

Download all Phrack .tar.gzs

useful tail on /var/log to avoid old logs or/and gzipped files
with discard wilcards in bash you can "tail" newer logs files to see what happen, any error, info, warn...

function to verify an IP address - can be used at the shell prompt or in a shell script
When processing IP addresses in the shell (or shell script) it is useful to be able to verify that the value of data is an IP address (an not some random string or non-sensible IP address).

hard disk information - Model/serial no.
Get the hard disk information with out shutting down and opening the system. It gives information on model no., serial no., cylinders/heads/sectors, and the supported features of the hard disk.

Finding all files on local file system with SUID and SGID set


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: