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

Do one ping to a URL, I use this in a MRTG gauge graph to monitor connectivity

Get line number of all matches in a file

Fork Bomb for Windows
Quick and dirty forkbomb for all flavors of windows Do not use in production. Replace start with a command of your choice, this will just open a new command prompt and is pretty tricky to stop once started

Download all music files off of a website using wget
This will download all files of the type specified after "-A" from a website. Here is a breakdown of the options: -r turns on recursion and downloads all links on page -l1 goes only one level of links into the page(this is really important when using -r) -H spans domains meaning it will download links to sites that don't have the same domain -nd means put all the downloads in the current directory instead of making all the directories in the path -A mp3 filters to only download links that are mp3s(this can be a comma separated list of different file formats to search for multiple types) -e robots=off just means to ignore the robots.txt file which stops programs like wget from crashing the site... sorry http://example/url lol..

Start a game on the discrete GPU (hybrid graphics)
On laptops featuring hybrid graphics and using the free X drivers, the DRI_PRIME variable indicates which GPU to run on. This alias allows to utilize the faster discrete GPU without installing proprietary drivers.

Start a quick rsync daemon for fast copying on internal secure network
"Sample output" shows a minimalistic configuration file.

List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu)
dpigs is in the package debian-goodies (debian/ubuntu)

To get the CPU temperature continuously on the desktop
No need for a colon, and one less semicolon too. Also untested.

bash shortcut: !$ !^ !* !:3 !:h and !:t
When expanding, bash output the command, so don't be affraid if you type the command. Here is the details: First examples: $echo foo bar foobar barfoo First argument: $echo !$ echo barfoo barfoo (Note that typing echo foo bar foobar barfoo && echo !$, bash substitute !$ with $:1) Last argument: $echo foo bar foobar barfoo && echo !^ echo foo bar foobar barfoo && echo barfoo foo bar foobar barfoo barfoo All the arguments: $echo !* echo foo bar foobar barfoo foo bar foobar barfoo The third argument: $echo foo bar foobar barfoo && echo !:3 echo foo bar foobar barfoo && echo foobar foo bar foobar barfoo foobar You may want to add {} for large numbers: echo !:{11} for example Now with path: $echo /usr/bin/foobar /usr/bin/foobar For the head: $echo !$:h echo /usr/bin /usr/bin And the tail: $echo !$:t echo foobar foobar You also may want to try !:h and !:t or !!3-4 for the third and the fourth (so !!:* == !!:1-$)

purge all packages marked with 'rc'
After you install/remove lots of packages, there are many packages marked with 'rc'. This script help you to purge these packages, it will save some spaces from your disk.


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: