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

Run remote web page, but don't save the results
I have a remote php file that I want to run once an hour. I set up cron to run this wget. I don't really care about what's in the file though, I don't want to save the results, so I run the -O and send it to /dev/null

Remind yourself to leave in 15 minutes
If you spend most of your time in front of the terminal, leave is a useful reminder. Leave can have absolute form: leave 1555 reminds you to leave at 3:55PM

Search apache virtual host by pattern
Outputs contents of virtual hosts containing PATTERN. Particularly useful for pefrorming complex searches. E.g. search for docroot of www.example.com: $ sed -n '/^[^#]*

Create higher quality gif from videos
I had to compress it a bit to meet the 255 limit. See sample for full command (274) usage: ffgif foo.ext Supports 3 arguments (optional) ffgif filename seek_time time_duration scale ffgif foo 10 5 320 will seek 10 seconds in, convert for 5 seconds at a 320 scale. Default will convert whole video to gif at 320 scale. Inspiration - http://superuser.com/questions/556029/how-do-i-convert-a-video-to-gif-using-ffmpeg-with-reasonable-quality/556031#556031

Download song from youtube for import into itunes (m4a format)
Last argument is the youtube link. Requires ffmpeg

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

Find out what the day ends in
Several people have submitted commands to do this, but I think this is the simplest solution. It also happens to be the most portable one: It should work with any sh or csh derived shell under any UNIX-like OS. Oh by the way, with my German locale ($LC_TIME set appropriately) it prints "g" most of the time, and sometimes (on Wednesdays) it prints "h". It never prints "y".

Notepad in a browser (type this in the URL bar)
It doesn't save your notes, but it's great for jotting something down quickly.

How to copy CD/DVD into hard disk (.iso)
A dear friend of mine asked me how do I copy a DVD to your hard drive? If you want to make a copy of the ISO image that was burned to a CD or DVD, insert that medium into your CD/DVD drive and (assuming /dev/cdrom is associated with your computer?s CD drive) type the following command

Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.


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: