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

Find the package that installed a command

Convert a flv video file to avi using mencoder

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

Get the serial numbers from HP RAID
This dumps serial numbers of all the drives but HP warranty check does not say they are valid ...

Advanced ls using find to show much more detail than ls ever could
This alias is super-handy for me because it quickly shows the details of each file in the current directory. The output is nice because it is sortable, allowing you to expand this basic example to do something amazing like showing you a list of the newest files, the largest files, files with bad perms, etc.. A recursive alias would be: $ alias LSR='find -mount -printf "%.5m %10M %#9u:%-9g %#5U:%-5G %TF_%TR %CF_%CR %AF_%AR %#15s [%Y] %p\n" 2>/dev/null' From: http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Create a random password encrypted with md5 with custom lenght
This was useful to generate random passwords to some webpage users, using the sample code, inside a bash script

histogram of file size

intercept stdout/stderr of another process

Share a terminal screen with others
If you enable multiuser, then you can permit others to share your screen session. The following conditions apply: 1. screen must be suid root; 2. "multiuser on" must be configured in ~/.screenrc; 3. control the others user(s) access with "aclchg": # ----- from ~/.screenrc-users ----- aclchg someuser +rx "#?" #enable r/o access to "someuser" aclchg someuser -x "#,at,aclchg,acladd,acldel,quit" # don't allow these aclchg otheruser +rwx "#?" # enable r/w access to "otheruser" aclchg otheruser -x "#,at,aclchg,acladd,acldel,quit" # don't allow them to use these commands # ----- After doing this (once), you start your session with: $ screen Then, the other user can join your terminal session(s) with youruserid: $ screen -r youruserid/ Note: the trailing "/" is required. Multiple users can share the same screen simultaneously, each with independent access controlled precisely with "aclchg" in the ~/.screenrc file. I use the following setup: # ~/.screenrc-base # default screenrc on any host source $HOME/.screenrc-base source $HOME/.screenrc-$HOST source $HOME/.screenrc-users # ----- Then, the base configurations are in ~/.screenrc-base; the host-specific configurations are in ~/.screenrc-$HOST, and the user configurations are in ~/.screenrc-users. The host-specific .screenrc file might contain some host-specific screen commands; e.g.: # ~/.screen-myhost # ----- screen -t 'anywhere' /bin/tcsh screen -t 'anywhere1' /bin/tcsh # ---- The .screenrc-base contains: # ~/.screenrc-base ## I find typing ^a (Control-a) awkward. So I set the escape key to CTRL-j instead of a. escape ^Jj termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@: autodetach on zombie kr verbose on multiuser on

find files containing text
-l outputs only the file names -i ignores the case -r descends into subdirectories


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: