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

Stat each file in a directory
Possible simplification of egrep-awk-sort with find and -exec with xargs.

Email an svn dump
Dumps a compressed svn backup to a file, and emails the files along with any messages as the body of the email

Use vi commands to edit your command lines
If you spend all day editing in vi then switching your fingers to Emacs mode just for the command line can be difficult. Use set -o vi in your bash shell and enjoy the power of a real editor.

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
As of this writing, this requires a fairly recent version of util-linux, but is much simpler than the previous alternatives. Basically, lsblk gives a nice, human readable interface to all the blkid stuff. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend this if you're going to be parsing the output.) This command takes all the fun out of the previous nifty pipelines, but I felt I ought to at least mention it as an alternative since it is the most practical.

Merge Two or More PDFs into a New Document
require the pdftk package

Display which user run process from given port name
Display which user run process from given port name

Show a 4-way scrollable process tree with full details.
If you want a visual representation of the parent/child relationships between processes, this is one easy way to do it. It's useful in debugging collections of shell scripts, because it provides something like a call traceback. When a shell script breaks, just remember "awwfux".

Make sure a script is run in a terminal.
Exit with error if script is not run in a terminal

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Video thumbnail
Faster thumbnail creation than '-itsoffset' $ffmpeg -itsoffset -4 -i test.avi -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 test.jpg


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: