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" }

Force hard reset on server
Useful when you have some wrong on a server (nfs freeze/ immortal process)

Hypnosis
for OS X

find out how many days since given date
Exactly the same number of characters, exactly the same results, but with bc

Find the package that installed a command

find read write traffic on disk since startup
The iostat command is used for monitoring system input/output device loading by observing the time the devices are active in relation to their average transfer rates. in ubuntu to get the iostat program do this: sudo apt-get install sysstat i found this command here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54379

Create a bash script from last commands
In order to write bash-scripts, I often do the task manually to see how it works. I type ### at the start of my session. The function fetches the commands from the last occurrence of '###', excluding the function call. You could prefix this with a here-document to have a proper script-header. Delete some lines, add a few variables and a loop, and you're ready to go. This function could probably be much shorter...

Edit a file in vim (at the first error) if it is not well formed xml.
Validate a file using xmllint. If there are parser errors, edit the file in vim at the line of the first error.

print all except first collumn

Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.
It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially. I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.


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: