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

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

remove OSX resource forks ._ files
DESCRIPTION For each dir, dot_clean recursively merges all ._* files with their cor- responding native files according to the rules specified with the given arguments. By default, if there is an attribute on the native file that is also present in the ._ file, the most recent attribute will be used. If no operands are given, a usage message is output. If more than one directory is given, directories are merged in the order in which they are specified.

List the size (in human readable form) of all sub folders from the current location

Copy modification timestamp from one file to another.

How many files in the current directory ?
A simple "ls" lists files *and* directories. So we need to "find" the files (type 'f') only. As "find" is recursive by default we must restrict it to the current directory by adding a maximum depth of "1". If you should be using the "zsh" then you can use the dot (.) as a globbing qualifier to denote plain files: zsh> ls *(.) | wc -l for more info see the zsh's manual on expansion and substitution - "man zshexpn".

Monitoring wifi connection by watch command (refresh every 3s), displaying iw dump info and iwconfig on wireless interface "wlan0"

Check if the Debian package was used since its installation/upgrade.
This script compares the modification date of /var/lib/dpkg/info/${package}.list and all the files mentioned there. It could be wrong on noatime partitions. Here is non-oneliner: #!/bin/sh package=$1; list=/var/lib/dpkg/info/${package}.list; inst=$(stat "$list" -c %X); cat $list | ( while read file; do if [ -f "$file" ]; then acc=$(stat "$file" -c %X); if [ $inst -lt $acc ]; then echo used $file exit 0 fi; fi; done exit 1 )

Use jq to validate and pretty-print json output
The `jq` tool can also be used do validate json files and pretty print output: ` jq < file.json` Available on several platforms, including newer debian-based systems via `#sudo apt install jq`, mac via `brew install jq`, and from source https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/ This alternative to the original avoids the useless use of cat

Start a command on only one CPU core
This is useful if you have a program which doesn't work well with multicore CPUs. With taskset you can set its CPU affinity to run on only one core.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.


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: