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

Search some text from all files inside a directory

Instead of saying RTFM!

Disable sending of start/stop characters
This command disable sending of start/stop characters. It's useful when you want to use incremental reverse history search forward shortcut (Ctrl+s). To enable again, type: $ stty -ixoff

Kill any lingering ssh processes

list block level layout

Compress a series of png pictures to an avi movie.
cd /path/to/your/png_pics mencoder "mf://*.png" -mf fps=2 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 then you can get a movie named output.avi.

Down for everyone or just me?
Check if a site is down with downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.

Get all shellcode on binary file from objdump
Better than the others, and actually works unlike some of them.

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text. Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent. Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher. (Does not require GNU date like some other commands)


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: