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

Check tcp-wrapping support
This function returns TRUE if the application supports tcp-wrapping or FALSE if not by reading the shared libraries used by this application.

Create colorized html file from Vim or Vimdiff
While editing a source file in vim, or using vimdiff to compare two or more files, the ':TOhtml' command can be used to export each buffer as an html file, including syntax highlighting and vimdiff colorization. If you are in insert mode in vim, you will have to type :TOhtml This will open a new buffer filled with html, which you can then save.

Show all available colors on your terminal.
Using perl and tput, show all the colors with numbers that your actual $TERM can handle. If want to remove the numbers at beginning of new line, it should be something like this: $perl -E 'say `tput setb $_`," "x `tput cols`, `tput sgr0` for 0 .. (`tput colors` - 1)'

prevent accidents and test your command with echo
if you're using wildcards * or ? in your command, and if you're deleting, moving multiple files, it's always safe to see how those wildcards will expand. if you put "echo" in front of your command, the expanded form of your command will be printed. It's better safe than sorry.

Print all lines in a file that are not a certain length
Alternatively, print all the lines that are a certain length: $awk 'length($0)==12 {print}' your_file_name

Convert PDF to JPG
Without the bashisms and unnecessary sed dependency. Substitutions quoted so that filenames with whitespace will be handled correctly.

Find Duplicate Files, excluding .svn-directories (based on size first, then MD5 hash)
Improvement of the command "Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)" when searching for duplicate files in a directory containing a subversion working copy. This way the (multiple dupicates) in the meta-information directories are ignored. Can easily be adopted for other VCS as well. For CVS i.e. change ".svn" into ".csv": $ find -type d -name ".csv" -prune -o -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type d -name ".csv" -prune -o -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate

Directory bookmarks
pushd and popd are your friends, but sometimes they're just incompatible with the way one works... Two shell functions: bm bookmarkname - "bookmarks" the current directory, just 'cd $BMbookmarkname' to return to it. forget bookmarkname - unsets the 'bookmarkname' variable. It isn't mandatory, they cease to exist when the session ends.

Alternative way to generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password usig sed
This is what I came up to generate XKCD #936 style four-word password. Since first letter of every word is capitalized it looks a bit more readable to my eyes. Also strips single quotes. And yes - regex is a bit of a kludge, but that's the bes i could think of.

Tell local Debian machine to install packages used by remote Debian machine
(also works on Ubuntu) Copies the 'install,' 'hold,' 'deinstall' and 'purge' states of packages on the remote machine to be matched on the local machine. Note: if packages were installed on the local machine that were never installed on the remote machine, they will not be deinstalled by this operation.


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: