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

split large video file
i have a large video file, 500+ MB, so i cant upload it to flickr, so to reduce the size i split it into 2 files. the command shows the splitting for the first file, from 0-4 minutes. ss is start time and t is duration (how long you want the output file to be). credit goes to philc: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=480343 NOTE: when i made the second half of the video, i got a *lot* of lines like this: frame= 0 fps= 0 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=10000000000.00 bitrate= 0.0kbit just be patient, it is working =)

Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)
Finds duplicates based on MD5 sum. Compares only files with the same size. Performance improvements on: $find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort -rn | uniq -d | xargs -I{} -n1 find -type f -size {}c -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate The new version takes around 3 seconds where the old version took around 17 minutes. The bottle neck in the old command was the second find. It searches for the files with the specified file size. The new version keeps the file path and size from the beginning.

from within vi, pipe a chunk of lines to a command line and replace the chunk with the result
The vi key sequence !}command will send the file contents from the cursor to the next blank line as STDOUT to the command specified and replace that sequence of file lines with the output of the command. For example: sorting a block of data - !}sort The sequence !{command will do the same but "upwards" (from the current position towards the start of the file.

get detailed info about a lan card on HP-UX 11.31

Replace Solaris vmstat numbers with human readable format
% cat ph-vmstat.awk # Return human readable numbers function hrnum(a) { b = a ; if (a > 1000000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fM", a/1000000) ; } else if (a > 1000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fK", a/1000) ; } return(b) ; } # Return human readable storage function hrstorage(a) { b = a ; if (a > 1024000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fG", a/1024/1024) ; } else if (a > 1024) { b = sprintf("%2.2fM", a/1024) ; } return(b) ; } OFS=" " ; $1 !~ /[0-9].*/ {print} $1 ~ /[0-9].*/ { $4 = hrstorage($4) ; $5 = hrstorage($5) ; $9 = hrnum($9) ; $10 = hrnum($10) ; $17 = hrnum($17) ; $18 = hrnum($18) ; $19 = hrnum($19) ; print ; }

tar copy
Just a copy of a big dir when you wan't things like ownership and date etc etc to be untouched. Note: Updated with the ideas from "mpb".

Rename all subtitles files with the same name of mp4 files in same folder
Use this command if you want to rename all subtitles for them to have the same name as the mp4 files. NOTE: The order of "ls -1 *.mp4" must match the order of "ls -1 *.srt", run the command bellow to make sure the *.srt files will really match the movies after run this command: paste -d:

Hold off any screensavers/timeouts
Moves the mouse 1 pixel down and to the right, then immediately back again, every 4 minutes. This keeps screensavers from turning on. I have used this extensively and I've never even noticed the mouse movement because it is so subtle.

Determine next available UID
Typical usage would be in a script that would want the next open UID in a range (in this case 500-600)

Restrict the bandwidth for the SCP command
the command is obvious, I know, but maybe not everyone knows that using the parameter "-l" you can limit the use of bandwidth command scp. In this example fetch all files from the directory zutaniddu and I copy them locally using only 10 Kbs


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: