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

Remove \r (carriage return) in a file

The wisdom of Cave Johnson
There's been a similar Futurama thing around for a while, which grabs a quote from the /. headers [curl -Ism3 slashdot.org | egrep "^X-(F|B|L)" | cut -d \- -f 2- | fmt -w $(tput cols)]. Same deal, but more likely to stop working when someone forgets to pay the bill on the domain. Until then: Cave Johnson!

Leap year calculation

Bind a key with a command
the -x option is for binding to a shell command

Get duration of an audio file in seconds.
This is an alternative to #9131. ffmpeg didn't work on my .au files, though it did on the .wav ones. Also useful if you don't have ffmpeg but do have sox. Handily, sox already reports in seconds (decimal).

Automatic ssh Session Logger
A wrapper around ssh to automatically provide logging and session handling. This function runs ssh, which runs screen, which runs script. . The logs and the screen session are stored on the server. This means you can leave a session running and re-attach to it later, or from another machine. . . Requirements: * Log sessions on a remote server * Transparent - nothing extra to type * No installation - nothing to copy to the server beforehand . Features: * Function wrapper delegating to ssh - so nothing to remember - uses .ssh/config as expected - passes your command line option to ssh * Self-contained: no scripts to install on the server * Uses screen(1), so is: - detachable - re-attachable - shareable * Records session using script(1) * Configurable log file location, which may contain variables or whitespace L="$HOME" # local variable L="\$HOME" # server variable L="some space" . Limitations: * Log dir/file may not contain '~' (which would require eval on the server) . . The sessions are named by the local user connecting to the server. Therefore if you detach and re-run the same command you will reconnect to your original session. If you want to connect/share another's session simply run: $ USER=bob ssh root@server . The command above is stripped down to an absolute minimum. A fully expanded and annotated version is available as a Gist (git pastebin): https://gist.github.com/flatcap/3c42326abeb1197ee714 . If you want to add timing info to script, change the command to: $ ssh(){ L="\$HOME/logs/$(date +%F_%H:%M)-$USER";/usr/bin/ssh -t "$@" "mkdir -p \"${L%/*}\";screen -xRRS $USER script --timing=\"$L-timing\" -f \"$L\"";}

Kill XMMS for a cron job

List open files that have no links to them on the filesystem
I have come across a situation in the past where someone has unlinked a file by running an 'rm' command against it while it was still being written to by a running process. The problem manifested itself when a 'df' command showed a filesystem at 100%, but this did not match the total value of a 'du -sk *'. When this happens, the process continues to write to the file but you can no longer see the file on the filesystem. Stopping and starting the process will, more often than not, get rid of the unlinked file, however this is not always possible on a live server. When you are in this situation you can use the 'lsof' command above to get the PID of the process that owns the file (in the sample output this is 23521). Run the following command to see a sym-link to the file (marked as deleted): $ cd /proc/23521/fd && ls -l Truncate the sym-link to regain your disk space: $ > /proc/23521/fd/3 I should point out that this is pretty brutal and *could* potentially destabilise your system depending on what process the file belongs to that you are truncating.

Extract all 7zip files in current directory taking filename spaces into account

This is how you should push a string in a command's stdin.
Don't do this: $echo word | command Using a bash "here strings" and "here documents" look leeter than piping echo into the command. Also prevents subshell execution. Word is also expanded as usual.


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: