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

Spoof your wireless MAC address on OS X to 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6
If you want to check that the spoof worked, type the same command as earlier: $ifconfig en1 | grep ether Now you will see: $ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6 For the wired ethernet port: $sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:e2:e3:e4:e5:e6

Run a command for a given time
or "Execute a command with a timeout" Run a command in background, sleep 10 seconds, kill it. $! is the process id of the most recently executed background command. You can test it with: find /& sleep10; kill $!

Make directories for and mount all iso files in a folder

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

history autocompletion with arrow keys
This will enable the possibility to navigate in the history of the command you type with the arrow keys, example "na" and the arrow will give all command starting by na in the history.You can add these lines to your .bashrc (without &&) to use that in your default terminal.

A function to find the newest file in a directory

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Shows picture exif GPS info if any and converts coords to a decimal degree number
This oneliner uses Imagemagic's identify utility to show the exif GPS information of an image an also converts Grad/MIn/Sec representation to a decimal degree number

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.

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format


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: