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

lists files and folders in a folder
lists files and folders in a folder with summary.

Create a new file

Silently ensures that a FS is mounted on the given mount point (checks if it's OK, otherwise unmount, create dir and mount)
In my example, the mount point is /media/mpdr1 and the FS is /dev/sdd1 /mountpoint-path = /media/mpdr1 filesystem=/dev/sdd1 Why this command ? Well, in fact, with some external devices I used to face some issues : during data transfer from the device to the internal drive, some errors occurred and the device was unmounted and remounted again in a different folder. In such situations, the command mountpoint gave a positive result even if the FS wasn't properly mounted, that's why I added the df part. And if the device is not properly mounted, the command tries to unmount, to create the folder (if it exists already it will also work) and finally mount the FS on the given mount point.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

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" }

Amazing real time picture of the sun in your wallpaper
Changes the wallpaper for the last IR picture of the sun taken by SOHO satellite. Lesser size, try $ curl http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_195/512/latest.jpg | xli -onroot -fullscreen -xzoom 120 -yzoom 120 -border black stdin I use inside kalarm(kde), updating every 15 minutes needs xli , curl

Google dictionary of word definitions
$ wget -qO - "http://www.google.com/dictionary/json?callback=dict_api.callbacks.id100&q=steering+wheel&sl=en&tl=en&restrict=pr,de&client=te" this does the actual google dictionary query, returns a JSON string encapsulated in some fancy tag $ sed 's/dict_api\.callbacks.id100.//' here we remove the tag beginning $ sed 's/,200,null)//' and here the tag end There are also some special characters which could cause problems with some JSON parsers, so if you get some errors, this is probably the case (sed is your friend). I laso like to trim the "webDefinitions" part, because it (sometimes) contains misleading information. $ sed 's/\,\"webDefinitions.*//' (but remember to append a "}" at the end, because the JSON string will be invalid) The output also contains links to mp3 files with pronounciation. As of now, this is only usable in the English language. If you choose other than English, you will only get webDefinitions (which are crap).

Display calendar with specific national holidays and week numbers
NB when you run this gcal command in your shell, holidays are highlighted but this highlighting does not show in the sample output (above). To find full details on gcal options: gcal --long-help | less Example for United States, Pennsylvania: gcal -K -q US_PA 2009 # display holidays in USA/Pennsylvania for 2009 (with week numbers) Example for Hong Kong: gcal -K -q HK 2009 # display holidays in Hong Kong for 2009 (with week numbers)

Update pandoc via cabal
An alternative to built-in package manager, keep pandoc in sync with upstream releases.

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.


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: