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

Synchronize date and time with a server over ssh
Shorter, easier to remember version of cmd#7636 NTP is better, but there are situations where it can't be used. In those cases, you can do this to sync the local time to a server.

fetch all revisions of a specific file in an SVN repository
Manages everything through one sed script instead of pipes of greps and awks. Quoting of shell variables is generally easier within a sed script.

Convert seconds to human-readable format
This example, for example, produces the output, "Fri Feb 13 15:26:30 EST 2009"

find filenames and directory names that doesn't conform ISO 9660 level 2
You might want to check what file and directory names would be renamed or chopped if you create iso 9660 level 2 image out of them. Use this command to check first.

Recover resolution when a fullscreen program crashes and you're stuck with a tiny X resolution
This forces X back to its maximum resolution configured. To get a list, type `xrandr'.

kill all process that belongs to you
This will probably kill any user sessions and/or ssh connections to other servers you might have active.

List your installed Firefox extensions

Listing package man page, services, config files and related rpm of a file, in one alias
Many times I give the same commands in loop to find informations about a file. I use this as an alias to summarize that informations in a single command. Now with variables! :D

Repeat a command until stopped
In this case it runs the command 'curl localhost:3000/site/sha' waiting the amount of time in sleep, ie: 1 second between runs, appending each run to the console. This works well for any command where the output is less than your line width This is unlike watch, because watch always clears the display.

List all symbolic links in current directory that matches regexp
Perl alternative to list symlinks with a clumsy regexp filter: place the regex instead of he example 'libxml' and end it with a wildchar to see the results (previous cd on dir). Is it possible change the '-l' test for '-d' and it will search for directories. [Same applies for -x and -X. See $(perldoc -f -x) for more tests]. I use it quite often when dealing with shared libraries...


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: