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

Happy Days
AFAIR this is the wording ;)

Execute a command with a timeout
A timeout is great, but what if the command is taking longer than expected because it's hung up or ran into some other problem? That's where the -k option comes in. Run "some_command" and timeout after 30s. If the command is still running after 1 minute, it will receive a kill signal.

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

Click on a GUI window and show its process ID and command used to run the process
This command is useful when you want to know what process is responsible for a certain GUI application and what command you need to issue to launch it in terminal.

Screensaver
Console screensaver.

Empty a file

Show what PID is listening on port 80 on Linux

Extract all GPS positions from a AVCHD video.

grep across a git repo and open matching files in gedit

Stamp a text line on top of the pdf pages.
To quickly add some remark, comment, stamp text, ... on top of (each of) the pages of the input pdf file.


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: