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

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
I like the order of the arguments better this way.

Prints total line count contribution per user for an SVN repository
make usable on OSX with filenames containing spaces. note: will still break if filenames contain newlines... possible, but who does that?!

Visit wikileaks.com
Who needs a DNS server

tar.gz with gpg-encryption on the fly
Create a encrypted tar.gz file from a directory on the fly. The encryption is done by GPG with a public key. The resulting filename is tagged with the date of creation. Very usefull for encrypted snapshots of folders.

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

Check if a machine is online
PING parameters c 1 limits to 1 pinging attempt q makes the command quiet (or silent mode) /dev/null 2>&1 is to remove the display && echo ONLINE is executed if previous command is successful (return value 0) || echo OFFLINE is executed otherwise (return value of 1 if unreachable or 2 if you're offline yourself). I personally use this command as an alias with a predefined machine name but there are at least 2 improvements that may be done. Asking for the machine name or IP Escaping the output so that it displays ONLINE in green and OFFLINE in red (for instance).

List your interfaces and MAC addresses

Show bandwidth use oneliner
poorman's ifstat using just sh and awk. You must change "eth0" with your interface's name.

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

List top 100 djs from https://djmag.com/top100djs


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: