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 syntax for all PHP files in the current directory and all subdirectories

faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

Change the homepage of Firefox
Pros: Works in all Windows computers, most updated and compatible command. Cons: 3 liner Replace fcisolutions.com with your site name.

convert mp3 into mb4 (audiobook format)
to convert a whole directory, put all mp3 files in a for loop $ for i in $(ls *mp3); do mpg123 -s $i | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o ${i%mp3}m4b -; done

Rename all (jpg) files written as 3 number in 4 numbers.
Useful if you have a list of images called 1 2 3 4 and so on, you can adapt it to rewrite it as 4 (in this example) 0-padded number.

Create a CD/DVD ISO image from disk.

Give any files that don't already have it group read permission under the current folder (recursive)
Makes any files in the current directory (and any sub-directories) group-readable. Using the "! -perm /g=r" limits the number of files to only those that do not already have this property Using "+" on the end of the -exec body tells find to build the entire command by appending all matching files before execution, so invokes chmod once only, not once per file.

Get AWS temporary credentials ready to export based on a MFA virtual appliance
You might want to secure your AWS operations requiring to use a MFA token. But then to use API or tools, you need to pass credentials generated with a MFA token. This commands asks you for the MFA code and retrieves these credentials using AWS Cli. To print the exports, you can use: `awk '{ print "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=\"" $1 "\"\n" "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=\"" $2 "\"\n" "export AWS_SESSION_TOKEN=\"" $3 "\"" }'` You must adapt the command line to include: * $MFA_IDis ARN of the virtual MFA or serial number of the physical one * TTL for the credentials

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Print the current time on the whole screen, updated every second
http://www.joachim-breitner.de/projects#screen-message now also supports reading stdin continuously to update what it shows, different ?slides? separated by a form feed character. Here, we feed the current time into it each second to create a large clock.


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: