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

Generate random valid mac addresses
Python Alternative

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode

Find the files that contain a certain term
Simple use of find and grep to recursively search a directory for files that contain a certain term.

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions
probably just like 1204, but uses tee as a filter (+ I actually understand how this one works)

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

monitor the last command run

Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes.
Use acpi and notify-send to report current temperature every five minutes. Works best in a shell script run at startup. acpi is called for temperature and fed to notify-send for a tooltip. After waiting five minutes, it will start over.

Go to parent directory of filename edited in last command

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.

Get IP from hostname


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: