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

Gets the last string of previous command with !$
It helps you save a lot of writing :-)

password generator
make password randomly, default 8 chars, using bash3.X only, no external program.

Generate a sequence of numbers.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

embed referred images in HTML files
in "a.html", find all images referred as relative URI in an HTML file by "src" attribute of "img" element, replace them with "data:" URI. This useful to create single HTML file holding all images in it, as a replacement of the IE-created .mht file format. The generated HTML works fine on every other browser except IE, as well as many HTML editors like kompozer, while the .mht format only works for IE, but not for every other browser. Compare to the KDE's own single-file-web-page format "war" format, which only opens correctly on KDE, the HTML file with "data:" URI is more universally supported. The above command have many bugs. My commandline-fu is too limited to fix them: 1. it assume all URLs are relative URIs, thus works in this case: $ but does not work in this case: $ This may not be a bug, as full URIs perhaps should be ignored in many use cases. 2. it only work for images whoes file name suffix is one of .jpg, .gif, .png, albeit images with .jpeg suffix and those without extension names at all are legal to HTML. 3. image file name is not allowed to contain "(" even though frequently used, as in "(copy of) my car.jpg". Besides, neither single nor double quotes are allowed. 4. There is infact a big flaw in this, file names are actually used as regular expression to be replaced with base64 encoded content. This cause the script to fail in many other cases. Example: 'D:\images\logo.png', where backward slash have different meaning in regular expression. I don't know how to fix this. I don't know any command that can do full text (no regular expression) replacement the way basic editors like gedit does. 5. The original a.html are not preserved, so a user should make a copy first in case things go wrong.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Watch the National Debt clock
The idea was originally stolen from Linux Journal. 'wget' pulls the debt clock and 'sed' reformats it for general consumption. Prefacing the command with 'watch' simply sets an interval - in this case every 10 seconds.

Dump the root directory to an external hard drive
This will compress the root directory to an external hard drive and split it to parts once it reaches the 4 Gigs file system limit. You can simply restore it with: $ restore ivf /media/My\ Passport/Fedora10bckup/root_dump_fedora

Grab a list of MP3s out of Firefox's cache
Grab a list of MP3s (with full path) out of Firefox's cache Ever gone to a site that has an MP3 embedded into a pesky flash player, but no download link? Well, this one-liner will yank the *full path* of those tunes straight out of FF's cache in a clean list. Shorter and Intuitive version of the command submitted by (TuxOtaku)

Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Just an alternative with more advanced formating for readability purpose. It now uses colors (too much for me but it's a kind of proof-of-concept), and adjust columns.


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: