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

Short Information about loaded kernel modules
Run this as root, it will be helpful to quickly get information about the loaded kernel modules.

Capture video of a linux desktop

how to find the active X (X11/xorg) username and DISPLAY variable
Requires consolekit (works in e.g. Ubuntu). Here x11-display is DISPLAY

Find the package that installed a command

Get the time since epoch
Get the time since epoch. Useful when working with commands and logs which use this format.

get partitions that are over 50% usage

Resume aborted scp file transfers
Put it into your sh startup script (I use alias scpresume='rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh' in bash). When a file transfer via scp has aborted, just use scpresume instead of scp and rsync will copy only the parts of the file that haven't yet been transmitted.

ssh batch jobs: query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command
Need to query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command ? Of course you'll have setup keys on all your remote HOSTs. But in the case a key is not present this command will skip that node, proceeding on to the next. -t: Force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine. Also prevents unwanted stty messages being sent to console -q: Quiet mode. -o "BatchMode yes" If set to yes, passphrase/password querying will be disabled. This option is useful in scripts and other batch jobs where no user is present

Add prefix onto filenames
Best to try first with -n flag, to preview

Re-emerge all ebuilds with missing files (Gentoo Linux)
Revised approach to and3k's version, using pipes and read rather than command substitution. This does not require fiddling with IFS when paths have whitespace, and does not risk hitting command-line size limits. It's less verbose on the missing files, but it stops iterating at the first file that's missing, so it should be definitely faster. I expanded all the qlist options to be more self-describing.


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: