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

Complex string encoding with sed
Pipe | avoid escaping occurences problems in using sed and make it easier to use

Reset terminal that has been buggered by binary input or similar

Encode file path to URL
Really helpfull when play with files having spaces an other bad name. Easy to store and access names and path in just a field while saving it in a file. This format (URL) is directly supported by nautilus and firefox (and other browsers)

Find the package that installed a command

Join a folder full of split files
If you use newsgroups then you'll have come across split files before. Joining together a whole batch of them can be a pain so this will do the whole folder in one.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

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" }

Open screen on the previous command
I often find myself wanting to open screen on whatever command I'm currently running. Unfortunately, opening a fresh screen session spawns a new bash session, which doesn't keep my history, so calling screen directly with the previous command is the only way to go.

Search manpages for a keyword
Search manpages for a keyword. Very useful when you don't know where to find the information.

generate a random 10 character password
Generate a table of random 10 character passwords


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: