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

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Format ps command output
ps command gives the possibility to display information with custom formatting with the -o options followed by the format specifier list.

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

Run a command when a file is changed

Sort the size usage of a directory tree by gigabytes, kilobytes, megabytes, then bytes.
Since coreutils 7.6 provides sort -h

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
First argument: string to put a box around. Second argument: character to use for box (default is '=') Same as command #4948, but shorter, and without the utility function.

Recursive replace of directory and file names in the current directory.
no grep, no perl, no pipe. even better in zsh/bash4: $ for i in **/*oldname*; do "mv $i ${i/oldname/newname/}"; done No find, no grep, no perl, no pipe

Gets the english pronunciation of a phrase
Sends a string to google tranlator, which converts it to English speech. It's possible to create a nice script to do the job for us, such as #!/bin'bash curl -A "Mozilla" "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=$1" > /tmp/speak.mp3 mplayer /tmp/speak.mp3

Bash command to convert IP addresses into their "reverse" form

Rename many files in directories and subdirectories
This is probably overkill, but I have some issues when the directories have spaces in their names. The $ find . -type d -print0 | while read -d $'\0' dir; do xxx; done loops over all the subdirectories in this place, ignoring the white spaces (to some extend). $ cd "$dir"; echo " process $dir"; cd -; goes to the directory and back. It also prints some info to check the progress. $ find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.ogg.mp3" -exec rename 's/.ogg.mp3/.mp3/' {} \; renames the file within the current directory. The whole should work with directories and file names that include white spaces.


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: