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

create random string from /dev/urandom (or another length)

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" }

Remove color codes (special characters) with sed

Click on a GUI window and show its process ID and command used to run the process
This command is useful when you want to know what process is responsible for a certain GUI application and what command you need to issue to launch it in terminal.

Purge configuration file of all desinstalled package
From: http://www.debian-administration.org/users/fsateler/weblog/4

Convert current symbolic directory into physical directory

bash: hotkey to put current commandline to text-editor
* in bash-shell You can capture the current commandline to a text-editor: * simply press: CTRL+x+e * Your current commandline will pe put into Your default text-editor (export EDITOR=vim)

Hide or show Desktop Icons on MacOS
Hides all Files and Folders on the MacOS Desktop. To show files and folders, type "true" instead of "false". "Finder" at the end is case sensitive, "finder" doesn’t work

Copy the full path of a file to the clipboard (requires xclip or similar)
Handy for those times you need to paste a file path in an IDE or some other app. sudo apt-get install xclip Then, for convenience, alias xclip to 'xclip -selection c' so you can just do something like realpath . | xclip

Connect to TCP port 5000, transfer data and close connexion.
With no '-q 0' switch, nc simply waits, and whatever awaits the data hangs.


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: