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

Currency Conversion
This works in Mac OS X (10.6.2) (natively comes with curl) usage: currency_convert $1(amount) $2(from_denomination) $3(to_denomination)

Speed up upgrades for a debian/ubuntu based system.
Please install aria2c before you try the above command. On ubuntu the command to install aria2c would be: $sudo aptitude install aria2

aplay some whitenoise
Plays whitenoise from /dev/urandom.

Dump dvd from a different machine onto this one.
You can use this to directly dump from machine A (with dvd drive) to machine B (without dvd drive) . I used this to copy dvd using my friend's machine to my netbook. Above command is to be issued on machine B. Advantages : 1) No wasting time dumping first to machine A and then copying to Machine B. 2) You dont need to use space on Machine A. In fact, this will work even when Machine A doesnt have enough hdd space to dump the DVD. Use -C ssh option on slow networks (enables compression). you can replace "dd if=/dev/dvd" with any ripping command as long as it spews the iso to stdout.

history manipulation
make make install !-2 && !-1

delete all leading and trailing whitespace from each line in file

Exclude svn directories with grep
exclude-dir option requires grep 2.5.3

give a binary the ability to open ports below 1024 as non root user
Binding a server to privileged port on Linux w/o running as root This is applicable to any service using privileged ports (< 1024), for instance to run a HTTP server on port 80 or a LDAP directory server on port 389 for example.

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Limit the transfer rate and size of data over a pipe
This example will close the pipe after transferring 100MB at a speed of 3MB per second.


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: