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

Unix alias for date command that lets you create timestamps in ISO 8601 format
I often need to add a timestamp to a file, but I never seem to remember the exact format string that has to be passed to the date command to get a compact datetime string like 20090220T231410 (i.e yyyymmddThhmmss, the ISO 8601 format popular outside the US)

Make a dedicated folder for each zip file
${f%*.zip} strips off the extension from zip filenames

Batch edition of all OpenOffice.org Writer files in the current directory (body text)
This function does a batch edition of all OOO3 Writer files in current directory. It uses sed to search a FOO pattern into body text of each file, then replace it to foo pattern (only the first match) . I did it because I've some hundreds of OOO3 Writer files where I did need to edit one word in each ones and open up each file in OOO3 gui wasn't an option. Usage: bsro3 FOO foo

Print a random 8 digit number

Kill processes that have been running for more than a week

Fetch the current human population of Earth
Fetches the world population JSON data from the US census and parses it uses jshon

Screencast of your PC Display with mp4 output
Since ffmpeg on Ubuntu is deprecated, now there is avconv. Please note that the screen area here is set with a predefined format "-s wxga" that is corresponding to "-s 1366x768") There is also the option to add a title in the metadata of the resulting video.

Command to Show a List of Special Characters for bash prompt (PS1)
I use this command (PS1) to show a list bash prompt's special characters. I tested it against A flavor of Red Hat Linux and Mac OS X

use wget to check if a remote file exists
put your link [url] to check if exist the remote file

List all execs in $PATH, usefull for grepping the resulting list
##Dependancies: bash coreutils Many executables in $PATH have the keyword somewhere other than the beginning in their file names. The command is useful for exploring the executables in $PATH like this. $ find ${PATH//:/ } -executable -type f -printf "%f\n" |grep admin lpadmin time-admin network-admin svnadmin users-admin django-admin shares-admin services-admin


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: