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 removed files still in use via /proc
Oracle DBA remove some logfiles which are still open by the database and he is complaining the space has not been reclaimed? Use the above command to find out what PID needs to be stopped. Or alternatively recover the file via: $ cp /proc/pid/fd/filehandle /new/file.txt

Bytebeat
Never ending music, generated via a C snippet, piped to aplay. Taken from: http://canonical.org/~kragen/bytebeat/

Run a script in parrallel over ssh
Runs a local script over ssh assuming ssh keys are in place. -P argument prints results to stdout. # Uses - https://code.google.com/p/parallel-ssh/

Make directories for and mount all iso files in a folder

defragment files
Thanks to flatcap for optimizing this command. This command takes advantage of the ext4 filesystem's resistance to fragmentation. By using this command, files that were previously fragmented will be copied / deleted / pasted essentially giving the filesystem another chance at saving the file contiguously. ( unlike FAT / NTFS, the *nix filesystem always try to save a file without fragmenting it ) My command only effects the home directory and only those files with your R/W (read / write ) permissions. There are two issues with this command: 1. it really won't help, it works, but linux doesn't suffer much (if any ) fragmentation and even fragmented files have fast I/O 2. it doesn't discriminate between fragmented and non-fragmented files, so a large ~/ directory with no fragments will take almost as long as an equally sized fragmented ~/ directory The benefits i managed to work into the command: 1. it only defragments files under 16mb, because a large file with fragments isn't as noticeable as a small file that's fragmented, and copy/ delete/ paste of large files would take too long 2. it gives a nice countdown in the terminal so you know how far how much progress is being made and just like other defragmenters you can stop at any time ( use ctrl+c ) 3. fast! i can defrag my ~/ directory in 11 seconds thanks to the ramdrive powering the command's temporary storage bottom line: 1. its only an experiment, safe ( i've used it several times for testing ), but probably not very effective ( unless you somehow have a fragmentation problem on linux ). might be a placebo for recent windows converts looking for a defrag utility on linux and won't accept no for an answer 2. it's my first commandlinefu command

Have subversion ignore a file pattern in a directory
If you don't want to commit files to subversion, and don't want those file to show up when doing an "svn stat", this command is what you need

Get DELL Warranty Information from support.dell.com
pretty much the same. I use awk rather than grep and perl. It looks like the URL has been updated. The service tag can also be retrieved via snmp - potential for a for loop over a list of servers. I might have a look into doing an example.

Translate your terminal into Swedish Chef
Bork, bork, bork! To keep it short, the first terminal line doesn't show a prompt.

Functions to display, save and restore $IFS
You can display, save and restore the value of $IFS using conventional Bash commands, but these functions, which you can add to your ~/.bashrc file make it really easy. To display $IFS use the function ifs shown above. In the sample output, you can see that it displays the characters and their hexadecimal equivalent. This function saves it in a variable called $saveIFS: $ sifs () { saveIFS=$IFS; } Use this function to restore it $ rifs () { IFS=$saveIFS; } Add this line in your ~/.bashrc file to save a readonly copy of $IFS: $ declare -r roIFS=$IFS Use this function to restore that one to $IFS $ rrifs () { IFS=$roIFS; }

Get movie length


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: