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

Join a folder full of split files
If you use newsgroups then you'll have come across split files before. Joining together a whole batch of them can be a pain so this will do the whole folder in one.

Find Out My Linux Distribution Name and Version

Generat a Random MAC address
Generate a random MAC address with capital letters

continuously print string as if being entered from the keyboard
Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption. $ cycle 1 3 $(openssl rand 100 | xxd -p) Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this: $ cycle 1 4 ' All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'

Print a row of characters across the terminal
Print a row of characters across the terminal. Uses tput to establish the current terminal width, and generates a line of characters just long enough to cross it. In the example '#' is used. It's possible to use a repeating sequence by dividing the columns by the number of characters in the sequence like this: $ seq -s'~-' 0 $(( $(tput cols) /2 )) | tr -d '[:digit:]' or $ seq -s'-~?' 0 $(( $(tput cols) /3 )) | tr -d '[:digit:]' You will lose chararacters at the end if the length isn't cleanly divisible.

Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories
With GNU chmod at least it is that simple.

Delete empty directories with zsh
This command uses the recursive glob and glob qualifiers from zsh. This will remove all the empty directories from the current directory down. The **/* recurses down through all the files and directories The glob qualifiers are added into the parenthesis. The / means only directories. The F means 'full' directories, and the ^ reverses that to mean non-full directories. For more info on these qualifiers see the zsh docs: http://zsh.dotsrc.org/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#SEC87

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

backup with mysqldump a really big mysql database to a remote machine over ssh
backup big mysql db to remote machine over ssh. "--skip-opt" option is needed when you can?t allocate full database in ram.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously


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: