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

pulsed terminal clock
hypnotizing pendulum

Schedule a script or command in x num hours, silently run in the background even if logged out
doesn't require "at", change the "2h" to whatever you want... (deafult unit for sleep is seconds)

Slow down IO heavy process
Some IO intensive process make the system unresponsive. This function periodically starts/stops a process, which hopefully releases some resources for other activities. This function is useful when ionice is not available

download a list of urls

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Plowshare, download files from cyberlocker like rapidshare megaupload ...etc
you need to have plowshare installed http://code.google.com/p/plowshare/ plowshare supports Megaupload, Rapidshare, 2Shared, 4Shared, ZShare, Badongo, Divshare.com, Depositfiles, Netload.in, Sendspace, Usershare, x7.to and some others file sharing services.

Merge tarballs
Requires the GNU tar ignore zeros option. http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_section/Blocking.html

make computer speaking to you :)
you can listen to your computer, but don't be carried away

create an incremental backup of a directory using hard links
dname is a directory named something like 20090803 for Aug 3, 2009. lastbackup is a soft link to the last backup made - say 20090802. $folder is the folder being backed up. Because this uses hard linking, files that already exist and haven't changed take up almost no space yet each date directory has a kind of "snapshot" of that day's files. Naturally, lastbackup needs to be updated after this operation. I must say that I can't take credit for this gem; I picked it up from somewhere on the net so long ago I don't remember where from anymore. Ah, well... Systems that are only somewhat slicker than this costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars - but we're HACKERS! We don't need no steenkin' commercial software... :)

To find which host made maximum number of specific tcp connections
This command is primarily going to work on linux boxes. and needs to be changed, for example IP=10\.194\.194\.2 PORT=389


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: