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

pngcrush all .png files in the directory
Find all pngs in directory structure and pngcrush them, none destructive. You can just remove the "{}.crush" part if you want destructive.

Create and access directory at the same time
Create and access directory (edited)

Bash Dialog
The dialog utility is used to create a basic level graphical user interface. We can use this in Shell script to create very useful programs.

Remove several files with ease
Rather than typing out all 10 files, you can use brace expansion to do the trick for you. This is useful for backup files, numbered files, or any files with a repeating pattern. Gives more control than 'rm file*' as I might want to keep others around.

File browser
Simple file browser with dmenu, ls, and xdg-open.

Show all machines on the network
Depending on the network setup, you may not get the hostname.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

revert a file with svn

Find all videos under current directory
Uses mime-type of files rather than relying on file extensions to find files of a certain type. This can obviously be extended to finding files of any other type as well.. like plain text files, audio, etc.. In reference to displaying the total hours of video (which was earlier posted in command line fu, but relied on the user having to supply all possible video file formats) we can now do better: $ find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -iNf - | grep video | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -d'\n' /usr/share/doc/mplayer/examples/midentify | grep ID_LENGTH | awk -F "=" '{sum += $2} END {print sum/60/60; print "hours"}'

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
Audio acknowledgement for host availability. When running the command from a Linux systems, you can use "festival" or "espeak" instead of "say".


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: