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

AWK Calculator

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Remove everything except that file
Remove everything except that file with shell tricks inside a subshell to avoid changes in the environment. $ help shopt

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" }

list files recursively by size

List only the directories
-d: list directory entries instead of contents, and do not dereference symbolic links

Measure, explain and minimize a computer's electrical power consumption
Run this command as root to get enough stats. It works on AMD and Intel machines, including desktops. If ran on a laptop it'll give you suggestions on extending your battery life. You'll need to install PowerTOP if you don't have, via 'apt-get install powertop', etc. To grep the output use: sudo powertop -d | grep ... The many command suggestions PowerTOP gives you alone will increase your command-line fu!

Display Dilbert strip of the day
Requires display. Corrected version thanks to sputnick and eightmillion user.

Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

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" }


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: