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

Socksify any program to avoid restrictive firwalls
Require: - tsocks (deb pkg) - A working SOCKS proxy. It's easy with ssh: $ ssh -N -D localhost:1080 your.home.pc -p 443 - tsocks configuration in your /etc/tsocks.conf (for the previous): server = 127.0.0.1 server_port = 1080

adjust laptop display hardware brightness [non root]

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Salvage a borked terminal
This works in some situations where 'reset' and the other alternatives don't.

Wait for file to stop changing
This loop will finish if a file hasn't changed in the last 10 seconds. . It checks the file's modification timestamp against the clock. If 10 seconds have elapsed without any change to the file, then the loop ends. . This script will give a false positive if there's a 10 second delay between updates, e.g. due to network congestion . How does it work? 'date +%s' gives the current time in seconds 'stat -c %Y' gives the file's last modification time in seconds '$(( ))' is bash's way of doing maths '[ X -lt 10 ]' tests the result is Less Than 10 otherwise sleep for 1 second and repeat . Note: Clever as this script is, inotify is smarter.

Don't like the cut command? Tired of typing awk '{print $xxx}', try this

print only matched pattern
Print only the matched pattern at the console

Watch memcache traffic
View all memcache traffic

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows


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: