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

1:1 copy of a volume
copies all files from the source disk / (skipping boundaries of mouted -in volumes) to /mnt/mydisk. Logical links are being preserved as well as devices, pipes etc. This can copy a MacOS X or Linux volume and keep it bootable. Note: its not suited to copy files with MacOS 9 style resources.

List subfolders from largest to smallest with sizes in human readable form

Get gzip compressed web page using wget.
Get gzip compressed web page using wget. Caution: The command will fail in case website doesn't return gzip encoded content, though most of thw websites have gzip support now a days.

Avoid killing the X server with CTRL+C on the tty it was started from

View internet connection activity in a browser
In addition to generating the current connections, it also opens then in your default browser on gnome.

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" }

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

export iPad App list to txt file
This will generate the same output without changing the current directory, and filepath will be relative to the current directory. Note: it will (still) fail if your iTunes library is in a non-standard location.

Extract domain from URl
Extracts 2nd-level domain part (or 3rd level, for co.* or com.*) from the URI's hostname. See sample output.

Belgian banking "structured communication"
Derived from current time down to minutes.


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: