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

Print a random 8 digit number
Don't need to pipe the output into rs if you just tell jot to use a null separator character.

Using ASCII Art output on MPlayer
Not so useful. Just a cool feature.

one-liner mpc track changer using dmenu
Add a [fluxbox] binding in your key file then this command provides a dmenu selector for the next track to play

Killing processes with your mouse in an infinite loop
Useful for quickly cleaning your Desktop. Nice joke if launched at startup.

Save the list of all available commands in your box to a file
When you press TAB twice in your prompt, bash tells you something like "Display all 4567 possibilities? (y or n)" But when you press "y" you only get the list in the terminal output and, if you want to save it to a file, you have to copy it by hand from the vterm screen. With this utility you save the list to a file or pipe it to another command at will You can use the file saved list to grep for a particular pattern, useful if you are searching for a command but you only remember a few letters

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Yet another way to add a line at the top a of text file with the help of the tac command (reverse cat).

Serial console to a Vmware VM
Create a serial console with "socket (named pipe)" of "/tmp/socket", "from:server, to:virtual machine" in vmware player, etc.. gui. Run the above command after you have booted the guest OS (which should also be configured for serial console).

Create a new file

Get sunrise and sunset times
This will get the sunrise and sunset times of a specific location. To be able to determine $l you need to first go to http://weather.yahoo.com/ and look up your location. The last numbers in the URL will be the $l Instead of forecastrss?w=$l you can also use forecastrss?p=$l and use the RSS link of the city you found. Also see http://developer.yahoo.com/weather/ for more information

Find the date of the first commit in a git repository
Finds the date of the first commit in a git repository branch


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: