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

List only directories, one per line
Alternatively, $ ls -F | grep /\$ but will break on directories containing newlines. Or the safe, POSIX sh way (but will miss dotfiles): $ for i in *; do test -d "./$i" && printf "%s\n" "$i"; done

Create a temporary file
To create directory, use: $ tempdir=$(/bin/mktemp -d)

Quickly batch resize images
-geometry (preserves values of height and width given, and aspect ratio). WARNING: While 'resize' creates resized copies of original files, 'mogrify' works on the original files, replacing them. It will overwrite the source files, use with caution, and backup regularly.

View online pdf documents in cli
Probably will not work very well with scanned documents.

Display IP adress of the given interface in a most portable and reliable way. That should works on many platforms.
Thanks to comment if that works or not... If you have already typed that snippet or you know you already have IO::Interface::Simple perl module, you can type only the last command : $ perl -e 'use IO::Interface::Simple; my $ip=IO::Interface::Simple->new($ARGV[0]); print $ip->address,$/;' ( The first perl command will install the module if it's not there already... )

Use find to get around Argument list too long problem
Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names.

Monitor system load and print out top offending processes
This checks the system load every second and if it's over a certain threshold (.8 in this example), it spits out the date, system loads and top 4 processes sorted by CPU. Additionally, the \a in the first echo creates an audible bell.

Find last reboot time
Specific to OSX.

Run a bash script in debug mode, show output and save it on a file

Set the hardware date and time based on the system date


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: