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

Manipulate the metadata when the photo was taken, this will shift with +15hours + 30min

Want to known what time is it in another part of the world ?
available timezone can be found in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Other examples: $ TZ=Europe/Paris date; TZ=Australia/Sydney date; TZ=America/New_York date this is based on zoneinfo files on macosx. Your mileage my vary on other unix dialects

Dump snapshot of UFS2 filesystem, then gzip it
Opens a snapshot of a live UFS2 filesystem, runs dump to generate a full filesystem backup which is run through gzip. The filesystem must support snapshots and have a .snap directory in the filesystem root. To restore the backup, one can do $ zcat /path/to/adXsYz.dump.gz | restore -rf -

PRINT LINE the width of screen or specified using any char including Colors, Escapes and metachars
One of the first functions programmers learn is how to print a line. This is my 100% bash builtin function to do it, which makes it as optimal as a function can be. The COLUMNS environment variable is also set by bash (including bash resetting its value when you resize your term) so its very efficient. I like pretty-output in my shells and have experimented with several ways to output a line the width of the screen using a minimal amount of code. This is like version 9,000 lol. This function is what I use, though when using colors or other terminal features I create separate functions that call this one, since this is the lowest level type of function. It might be better named printl(), but since I use it so much it's more optimal to have the name contain less chars (both for my programming and for the internal workings). If you do use terminal escapes this will reset to default. $ tput sgr0 For implementation ideas, check my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Send a local file via email
This just reads in a local file and sends it via email. Works with text or binary. *Requires* local mail server.

yes > /dev/null
your laptop can be a good heater :)

Screencast of your PC Display with mp4 output
Since ffmpeg on Ubuntu is deprecated, now there is avconv. Please note that the screen area here is set with a predefined format "-s wxga" that is corresponding to "-s 1366x768") There is also the option to add a title in the metadata of the resulting video.

Restore deleted file from GIT repository
This command will automatically find the latest version of the file that was deleted and restore it to it's previous location. If, of course, your file was kept in a git repository... I found this command on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1113140

Find the biggest files
Also: * find . -type f -exec ls -s {} \; | sort -n -r | head -5 * find . -type f -exec ls -l {} \; | awk '{print $5 "\t" $9}' | sort -n -r | head -5

Cut flv video from minute 19 to minute 20 using flvtool2
We should calculate the video duration to milliseconds, 1 minute = 60000 milliseconds


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: