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

Safely remove old unused kernels in Ubuntu/Debian
Removes piling kernels from /boot, save the current one. This command DOES NOT remove the 'linux-image-generic' package, so you'll continue getting kernel updates

'Fix' a typescript file created by the 'script' program to remove control characters
attribution: Thanks to repellent on perlmonks.org source: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=684459

Spell check the text in clipboard (paste the corrected clipboard if you like)
xclip -o > /tmp/spell.tmp # Copy clipboard contents to a temp file aspell check /tmp/spell.tmp # Run aspell on that file cat /tmp/spell.tmp | xclip # Copy the results back to the clipboard, so that you can paste the corrected text I'm not sure xclip is installed in most distributions. If not, you can install x11-apps package

Find and remove core files

climagic's New Year's Countdown clock
This is the 140 character long new year's countdown timer that was posted to the climagic account on twitter and identi.ca. There are saner ways of doing this of course, but probably none of those would fit. Uses the figlet command, but of course you can replace figlet with just echo if you want.

pip install into current directory without virtualenv
For subsequent commands in the prefixed path: $ PYTHONPATH=$PWD/lib/python*/site-packages ./bin/pip --version

Make a server's console beep when the network is down
This is like ping -a, but it does the opposite. It alerts you if the network is down, not up. Note that the beep will be from the speaker on the server, not from your terminal. Once a second, this script checks if the Internet is accessible and beeps if it is not. I define the Net as being "UP", if I can ping Google's public DNS server (8.8.8.8), but of course you could pick a different static IP address. I redirect the beep to /dev/console so that I can run this in the background from /etc/rc.local. Of course, doing that requires that the script is run by a UID or GID that has write permissions to /dev/console (usually only root). Question: I am not sure if the -W1 flag works under BSD. I have only tested this under GNU/Linux using ping from iputils. If anybody knows how portable -W is, please post a comment.

Clear current session history (bash)

Benchmark report generator
Nicely display in html format a detailed report of the machine, including cpu benchmarks.

Find the package that installed a command


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: