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 the last command, but say 'y' to everything
I doubt this works with other than bash, but then again, I havent tried. The 'yes' utility is very simple, it outputs a hell of a lot of 'y's to standard input. The '!!' command means 'the last command'. So this one-lines inputs a lot of y's into the last command, aggressively agreeing to everything. For instance, when doing apt-get.

print battery , thermal , and cooling info

Get length of current playlist in xmms2

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
This allows for sleeping in between pings. Also, espeak needs to be installed.

Pulse Volume Control Using Zenity
This produces a little bar that you can use to set the volume percentage.

Given process ID print its environment variables
Same as previous but without fugly sed =x

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Base conversions with bc
Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing "ibase=16; obase=8; F2A" to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

Edit a file on a remote host using vim


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: