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

UPS Tracking Script

Get the number of days in a given month and year

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Archive a directory with datestamp on filename
A useful bash function: gztardir() { if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then echo "incorrect arguments: should be gztardir " else tar zcvf "${1%/}-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M).tar.gz" "$1" fi }

back ssh from firewalled hosts
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh. host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd). once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B. host B just do a ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user and reaches the remote host'ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.

List the CPU model name
Extracts the model name of the CPU and displays it on screen.

continuously check size of files or directories

Find out what the day ends in
Several people have submitted commands to do this, but I think this is the simplest solution. It also happens to be the most portable one: It should work with any sh or csh derived shell under any UNIX-like OS. Oh by the way, with my German locale ($LC_TIME set appropriately) it prints "g" most of the time, and sometimes (on Wednesdays) it prints "h". It never prints "y".

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

Convert encoding of given files from one encoding to another


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: