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

Quick key/value display within /proc or /sys
Within /proc and /sys there are a lot of subdirectories, which carry pseudofiles with only one value as content. Instead of cat-ing all single files (which takes quite a time) or do a "cat *" (which makes it hard to find the filename/content relation), just grep recursively for . or use "grep . /blabla/*" (star instead of -r flag). For better readability you might also want to pipe the output to "column -t -s : ".

Rename files in batch

Rename files in batch

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.'

Easy way to scroll up und down to change to one of n last visited directories.
This alias is meant to append n (here is n=10) most recently used cd commands to the bottom of history file. This way you can easily change to one of previous visited directories simply by hitting 1-10 times arrow up key. Hint: You can make more aliases implying the same rule for any set of frequently used long and complex commands like: mkisof, rdesktop, gpg...

Delete a file/directory walking subdirectories (bash4 or zsh)

open path with your default GNOME program
Another step to bring cli and gui closer together: gnome-open It opens a path with the default (gui) application for its mime type. I would recommend a shorter alias like alias o=gnome-open More examples: $ gnome-open . [opens the current folder in nautilus / your default file browser] $ gnome-open some.pdf [opens some.pdf in evince / your default pdf viewer] $ gnome-open trash:// [opens the trash with nautilus] $ gnome-open http://www.commandlinefu.com [opens commandlinefu in your default webbrowser]

split source code to page with numbers

Factorial With Case
Computes factorials.

View acceptable client certificate CA names asked for during SSL renegotiations
The key is to use the -prexit option at the command line, and then type "quit" instead of CTRL-C to exit OpenSSL. OpenSSL will then dump its last negotiated state, printing out the contents of the renegotiated handshake. Crucial for debugging client certificate configurations on web servers such as IIS, which renegotiate the SSL/TLS connection with the HTTP request in-flight to ask the client for a cert.


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: