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

Mount an smb share on linux
Mount an smb share with this command. other options -ousername=$USERr,gid=$groupname,scope=rw

Hide the name of a process listed in the `ps` output
$ exec -a $NAME $COMMAND $ARGS `your_cmd -erase_all_files` is the real process, but harmless-looking getty appears in the process table. Never actually had a need to do this, but interesting nonetheless... Tested in bash, dash. $ -a $NAME "pass NAME as the zeroth argument to COMMAND", i.e. customise the name of the process (as commonly seen with `ps`)

Get video information with ffmpeg
I used an flv in my example, but it'll work on any file ffmpeg supports. It says it wants an output file, but it tells what you want to know without one.

All what exists in dir B and not in dir A will be copied from dir B to new or existing dir C
Assumed dir A, B, C are subdirs of the current dir Exact syntax of the command is: rsync -v -r --size-only --compare-dest=/path_to_A/A/ /path_to_B/B/ /path_to_C/C/ (do not omit end-slashes, since that would copy only the names and not the contents of subdirs of dir B to dir C) You can replace --size-only with --checksum for more thorough file differences validation Useful switch: -n, --dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made

List open sockets protocol/address/port/state/PID/program name

Remove space and/or tab characters at the end of line
The command removes all space and/or tabulation characters preceding new line

sed : using colons as separators instead of forward slashes
Having to escape forwardslashes when using sed can be a pain. However, it's possible to instead of using / as the separator to use : . I found this by trying to substitute $PWD into my pattern, like so $ sed "s/~.*/$PWD/" file.txt Of course, $PWD will expand to a character string that begins with a / , which will make sed spit out an error such as "sed: -e expression #1, char 8: unknown option to `s'". So simply changing it to $ sed "s:~.*:$PWD:" file.txt did the trick.

Take a screenshot of the window the user clicks on and name the file the same as the window title
In general, this is actually not better than the "scrot -d4" command I'm listing it as an alternative to, so please don't vote it down for that. I'm adding this command because xwd (X window dumper) comes with X11, so it is already installed on your machine, whereas scrot probably is not. I've found xwd handy on boxen that I don't want to (or am not allowed to) install packages on. NOTE: The dd junk for renaming the file is completely optional. I just did that for fun and because it's interesting that xwd embeds the window title in its metadata. I probably should have just parsed the output from file(1) instead of cutting it out with dd(1), but this was more fun and less error prone. NOTE2: Many programs don't know what to do with an xwd format image file. You can convert it to something normal using NetPBM's xwdtopnm(1) or ImageMagick's convert(1). For example, this would work: "xwd | convert fd:0 foo.jpg". Of course, if you have ImageMagick already installed, you'd probably use import(1) instead of xwd. NOTE3: Xwd files can be viewed using the X Window UnDumper: "xwud <foo.xwd". ImageMagick and The GIMP can also read .xwd files. Strangely, eog(1) cannot. NOTE4: The sleep is not strictly necessary, I put it in there so that one has time to raise the window above any others before clicking on it.

Easily decode unix-time (funtion)
A shell function using perl to easily convert Unix-time to text. Put in in your ~/.bashrc or equivalent. Tested on Linux / Solaris Bourne, bash and zsh. using perl 5.6 and higher. (Does not require GNU date like some other commands)

Check if a web page has changed last time checked.
Checks if a web page has changed. Put it into cron to check periodically. Change http://www.page.de/test.html and mail@mail.de for your needs.


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: