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

The top ten commands you use

Arch Linux sort installed packages by size
This one-liner will output installed packages sorted by size in Kilobytes.

play audio stream and video stream in two different mplayer instances
Sometimes audio and video are not sync'ed. The factor 1.0884 is the quotient 48000/44100. One mplayer plays the audio file in the background, the other the video in the foreground. You can dump the audio file before with another commandlinefu

Open a manpage in the default (graphical) web browser
An easy alias for opening a manpage, nicely HTML formatted, in your set internet browser. If you get a "command exited with status 3" error you need to install groff.

Get backup from remote host, then expand in current directory using tar

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" }

sends your internal IP by email
This is useful if you have need to do port forwarding and your router doesn't assign static IPs, you can add it to a script in a cron job that checks if you IP as recently changed or with a trigger script. This was tested on Mac OSX.

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
Scrap everything and use `gawk` to do all the magic, since it's like the future or something. $ gawk 'match($11, /[a-z]{3}$/) && match($9, /^ata-/) { gsub("../", ""); print $11,"\t",$9 }' Yank out only ata- lines that have a drive letter (ignore lines with partitions). Then strip ../../ and print the output. Yay awk. Be sure to see the alternatives as my initial command is listed there. This one is a revision of the original.

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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: