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

Merge PDFs into single file

Use md5sum to check your music and movie files. Also use diff.
This is a beginning script. You can create a file with > filename. You can also use diff to compare output run at different times to verify no change in your files. I apologize in advance if this is too simple. For some it should be a start.

Get decimal ascii code from character
the shortest command for character 'a' i know

Discovering all open files/dirs underneath a directory
It may be helpful in case you need to umount a directory and some process is preventing you to do so keeping the folder busy. The lsof may process the +D option slowly and may require a significant amount of memory because it will descend the full dir tree. On the other hand it will neither follow symlinks nor other file systems.

Convert ascii string to hex
Here's a version that uses perl. If you'd like a trailing newline: $ perl -pe 's/(.)/sprintf("\\x%x", ord($1))/eg; END {print "\n"}'

Regenerate the /etc/mtab file

Get size of terminal
See the cols and lines and make sure the console it correctly configured for the screen size.

Download entire commandlinefu archive to single file
'jot' does not come with most *nix distros, so we need to use seq to make it work. This version tested good on Fedora 11.

find files larger than 1 GB, everywhere

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" }


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: