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

list all files in a directory, sorted in reverse order by modification time, use file descriptors.
It's both silly, and infinitely useful. Especially useful in logfile directories where you want to know what file is being updated while troubleshooting.

prints the parameter you used on the previous command

open a screenshot of a remote desktop via ssh
standard image viewers do not seem to be able to open a FIFO file. xloadimage was the first one i've stumbled upon that can handle this.

a function to put environment variable in zsh history for editing
This only makes sense if you are using command line editing. Create the function in your current zsh session, then type eve PATH go 'UP' in your history and notice the current (editable) definition of PATH shows up as the previous command. Same as doing: PATH="'$PATH'" but takes fewer characters and you don't have to remember the escaping.

cleanup /tmp directory
Cleans all files in /tmp that have been accessed at least 2 days ago.

Download song from youtube for import into itunes (m4a format)
Last argument is the youtube link. Requires ffmpeg

Get your X11 screen mode

Convert a flv video file to avi using mencoder

Tricky implementation of two-dimensional array in Bash.
Since Bash doesn't support two-dimensional arrays, you can limit your columns length by some big enough constant value ( in this example 100 ) and then index the array with i and j, or maybe write your own get() and set() methods to index the array properly like I implemented for example ( see Sample output ). For example for i=0 and j=0...99 you'll pick up one of 100 elements in the range [0,99] in the one-dimensional array. For i=1 and j=0...99 you'll pick up one of 100 elements in the range [100,199]. And so on. Be careful when using this, and remember that in fact you are always using one-dimensional array.

Search back through previous commands
Searches backwards through your command-history for the typed text. Repeatedly hitting Ctrl-R will search progressively further. Return invokes the command.


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: