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

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.
Very useful when you need disk space. It calculates the disk usage of all files and dirs (descending them) located at the current directory (including hidden ones). Then sort puts them in order.

Avoiding history file to be overwritten
If histappend options is set in bash, the file .bash_history will not be overwrite and history list is append to it.

python smtp server
This command will start a simple SMTP server listening on port 1025 of localhost. This server simply prints to standard output all email headers and the email body.

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" }

list files recursively by size

Sync the existing directory structure to destination, without transferring any files

Find the modified time (mtime) for a file

ls -qaltr # list directory in chronological order, most recent files at end of list
I find it very handy to be able to quickly see the most recently modified/created files in a directory. Note that the "q" option will reveal any files with non-printable characters in their filename.

run complex remote shell cmds over ssh, without escaping quotes
It executes commands as arguments to ssh, avoiding problematic shell expansions, without the need of writing the commands in question to a temporary file, just reading them from STDIN.

detect partitions
`blkid` is an interface to libuuid - it can read Device Mapper, EVMS, LVM, MD, and regular block devices. -c /dev/null - Do not use cached output from /etc/blkid.tab or /etc/blkid/blkid.tab (RHEL) -i - Display I/O Limits (aka I/O topology) information (not available in RHEL) -p - Low-level superblock probing mode (not available in RHEL)


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: