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

Clone current directory into /destination verbosely
Copy every file from current directory to destination preserving modification time.

Lurk what's going on on remote console

Colour part of your prompt red to indicate an error
If the return code from the last command was greater than zero, colour part of your prompt red. The commands give a prompt like this: [user current_directory]$ After an error, the "[user" part is automatically coloured red. Tested using bash on xterm and terminal. Place in your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

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" }

Verify if user account exists in Linux / Unix

Print a row of 50 hyphens

Securely destroy data on given device
Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

Show this month's calendar, with today's date highlighted
Explanation: * The date command evaluated to today's date with blank padded on the left if single digit * The grep command search and highlight today's date * The --before-context and --after-context flags displays up to 6 lines before and after the line containing today's date; thus completes the calendar. I have tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard and Xubuntu 8.10

List alive hosts in specific subnet
Works on any machine with nmap installed. Previous version does not work on machines without "seq". Also works on subnets of any size.

SED - Substitute string in next line
source: http://sed.sourceforge.net/sed1line.txt


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: