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

Search for in which package the specified file is included.

Quick key/value display within /proc or /sys
Within /proc and /sys there are a lot of subdirectories, which carry pseudofiles with only one value as content. Instead of cat-ing all single files (which takes quite a time) or do a "cat *" (which makes it hard to find the filename/content relation), just grep recursively for . or use "grep . /blabla/*" (star instead of -r flag). For better readability you might also want to pipe the output to "column -t -s : ".

Convert the output of one or more (log, source code ...) files into html,
Requires the "enscript" package. frank@zappa:~# sudo apt-get install enscript Or http://www.codento.com/people/mtr/genscript/ "use your head"

awk date convert
Convert readable date/time with `date` command

Show directories in the PATH, one per line
The output of "echo $PATH" is hard to read, this is much easier. The parentheses ensure that the change to the input field separator (IFS) only happens the the sub shell and not affecting the current shell.

list folders containing less than 2 MB of data
Just shortened the awk a bit and removed sed. Edit: I'm assuming there are no spaces in the path. To support white space in pathname try: $ awk '($1 < 2048) {sub(/^[0-9]+[ \t]+/,""); print $0}'

Find broken symlinks
Locate broken symlinks in the current directory. Also useful, to remove broken links: $ find . -type l ! -exec test -e {} \; -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Kill google chrome process

Quickly batch resize images
-geometry (preserves values of height and width given, and aspect ratio). WARNING: While 'resize' creates resized copies of original files, 'mogrify' works on the original files, replacing them. It will overwrite the source files, use with caution, and backup regularly.


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: