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

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" }

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Generate White Noise
This command will generate white noise through your speakers (assuming you have sound enabled). It's good for staying focused, privacy, coping with tinnitus, etc. I use it to test that the sound works.

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

Get a quick list of all user and group owners of files and dirs under the cwd.
find -printf '%u\n' | sort | uniq #just users find -printf '%g\n' | sort | uniq #just groups

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Generate random password on Mac OS X
Feel free to put this in your ~/.profile: $ random(){ cat /dev/urandom | env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc $1 | head -c $2; echo; } Then use it to generate passwords: $ random [:alnum:] 16 Or DNA sequences: $ random ACGT 256

Command to logout all the users in one command
Logs all users out except root. I changed the grep to use a regexp in case a user's username contained the word root.

Change host name
With sed you can replace strings on the fly.

DELETE all those duplicate files but one based on md5 hash comparision in the current directory tree
This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories). Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd. md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems. The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used. Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept. It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00. As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead: $ find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | perl -ne 'chomp; $ph=$h; ($h,$f)=split(/\s+/,$_,2); if ($h ne $ph) { $k = $f; } else { unlink($f); link($k, $f); }'


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: