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

Compress files in a directory

Generate hash( of some types) from string
No need to install yet another program when openssl is already installed. :-)

save stderr only to a file
taken from http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/158311-how-tee-stderr.html " What does it mean? The redirection operator n>&m makes file descriptor n to be a copy of file descriptor m. So, whe are: - Opening a new file descriptor, 3, that is a copy of file descriptor 1, the standard output; - Making file descriptor 1 a copy of file descriptor 2, the standard error output; - Making file descriptor 2 to be a copy of file descriptor 3 (the "backup" of the standard output) in a short: we swapped the standard output and the standard error output. "

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

Produce a pseudo random password with given length in base 64
Of course you will have to install Digest::SHA and perl before this will work :) Maximum length is 43 for SHA256. If you need more, use SHA512 or the hexadecimal form: sha256_hex()

Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)
for OS X

Generate a Google maps URL for GPS location data from digital photo
This command uses the "exiftool" command which is available here: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ NB, there should be a degree symbol right after the first "%d" NOT a question mark. For some unknown reason, commandlinefu is not able to handle degree symbol correctly ("?")?

List docker volumes by container

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" }

Faster find and move using the find and xargs commands. Almost as fast as locate.
Only tested on Linux Ubunty Hardy. Works when file names have spaces. The "-maxdepth 2" limits the find search to the current directory and the next one deeper in this example. This was faster on my system because find was searching every directory before the current directory without the -maxdepth option. Almost as fast as locate when used as above. Must use double quotes around pattern to handle spaces in file names. -print0 is used in combination with xargs -0. Those are zeros not "O"s. For xargs, -I is used to replace the following "{}" with the incoming file-list items from find. Echo just prints to the command line what is happening with mv. mv needs "{}" again so it knows what you are moving from. Then end with the move destination. Some other versions may only require one "{}" in the move command and not after the -I, however this is what worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04. Some like to use -type f in the find command to limit the type.


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: