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 a simple video contact sheet using the vcs bash script
Assumes you've downloaded Toni Corvera's vcs script (http://p.outlyer.net/vcs), have it in your PATH, and have installed the script's dependencies. Generates a video contact sheet of 24 thumbnails and 3 thumbnails per column. The bold font and white-on-black color scheme keeps the text readable at the chosen 70% JPEG compression quality, which keeps the file size at a manageable level. You can go even lower with the quality and get a good looking result.

Figure out what shell you're running

Access partitions inside a LVM volume
kpartx can be found inside of the multipath-tools package -a adds the mappings and -d deletes them

Generate a certificate signing request (CSR) for an existing private key. CSR.csr MUST be exists before
CSR.csr MUST be exists before

Echo the contents of a Url
Directly send the content of a url to standard out. This command is most convenient for sending the output of a download directly to another command.

Recursively unrar into dir containing archive
From the cwd, recursively find all rar files, extracting each rar into the directory where it was found, rather than cwd. A nice time saver if you've used wget or similar to mirror something, where each sub dir contains an rar archive. Its likely this can be tuned to work with multi-part archives where all parts use ambiguous .rar extensions but I didn't test this. Perhaps unrar would handle this gracefully anyway?

Learn the difference between single and double quotes

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

history manipulation
make make install !-2 && !-1

See non printable caracters like tabulations, CRLF, LF line terminators ( colored )
For fancier and cleaner output, try the following snippet : $ showendlines(){ while read i; do od --address-radix=n --width=$(wc -c


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: