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

dd with progress bar
piping through 'pv' shows a simple progress/speed bar for dd. This is a replacement for my otherwise favorite 'while :;do killall -USR1 dd;sleep 1;done'

colorize sequences of digits
Credits go to Flatcap https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/by/flatcap

Twitpic upload and Tweet

Pause Current Thread
Hold ctrl and press z to pause the current thread. Run $fg to resume it.

create random numbers within range for conjob usage
if you need to install cron jobs in a given time range.

Make redirects to localhost via /etc/hosts more interesting
Normally when a site is blocked through /etc/hosts, traffic is just being redirected to a non-existent server that isn't going to respond. This helps get your point across a little more clearly than a browser timeout. Of course you could use any number of codes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes Obviously, this command can be added to init-rc.d, and more sophisticated responses can be given. Seems noteworthy to mention that the information sent from the browser can be parsed using the bash READ builtin (such as 'while read -t 1 statement; do parsing'), and the connection stays open until the script exits. Take care that you must use EXEC:'bash -c foo.sh', as 'execvp' (socat's method for executing scripts) invokes 'sh', not 'bash'.

Duplicate installed packages from one machine to the other (RPM-based systems)

PDF simplex to duplex merge
Joins two pdf documents coming from a simplex document feed scanner. Needs pdftk >1.44 w/ shuffle.

Diff two directories by finding and comparing the md5 checksums of their contents.
Compute the md5 checksums for the contents of two mirrored directories, then sort and diff the results. If everything matches, nothing is returned. Otherwise, any checksums which do not match, or which exist in one tree but not the other, are returned. As you might imagine, the output is useful only if no errors are found, because only the checksums, not filenames, are returned. I hope to address this, or that someone else will!

Get all URLs from webpage via Regular Expression
Get all URLs from website via Regular Expression... You must have lynx installed in your computer to execute the command. --> lynx --dump "" | egrep -o "" - Must substitute it for the website path that you want to extract the URLs - Regular Expression that you wanna filter the website


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: