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May 19, 2015 - A Look At The New Commandlinefu
I've put together a short writeup on what kind of newness you can expect from the next iteration of clfu. Check it out here.
March 2, 2015 - New Management
I'm Jon, I'll be maintaining and improving clfu. Thanks to David for building such a great resource!
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awk, bash, curl, find, grep, Linux, sed
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Maintained by Jon H.

Site originally by David Winterbottom (user root).

Psst. Open beta.

Wow, didn't really expect you to read this far down. The latest iteration of the site is in open beta. It's a gentle open beta-- not in prime-time just yet. It's being hosted over at UpGuard (link) and you are more than welcome to give it a shot. Couple things:

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  • » If you wish to use your user account, you will probably need to reset your password.
Your feedback is appreciated via the form on the beta page. Thanks! -Jon & CLFU Team

All commands from sorted by
Terminal - All commands - 12,361 results
disper --displays=auto -e -t left
2010-01-28 06:46:56
User: unixmonkey6754
-1
Up
Down
Autodetect screens and extend workspace to the left

Disper: http://willem.engen.nl/projects/disper/

Moving Gnome Panels to the external screen is done using gconf-editor, changing property "/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/monitor", as well as "/apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0/monitor" to int value "1". This can be done from the command line using '

gconftool-2 --set "/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/monitor" --type integer "1"' so a nice script can be written.

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wget -O - http://checkip.dyndns.org|sed 's/[^0-9.]//g'
2009-08-06 12:47:32
User: thundernode
Functions: sed wget
-1
Up
Down
Get your external IP address
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svn log -v | less
2010-02-26 08:01:55
User: jimthunderbird
-1
Up
Down
Find out who change what files in a SVN repository
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for i in *; do j=`echo $i | cut -d "-" -f1`; j=$j; mv $i $j; done
2011-03-06 11:58:37
User: jaimerosario
Functions: cut mv
-1
Up
Down
Batch file suffix renaming

Renames files eliminating suffix, in this case everything after "-" is cutted. Just change "-" with the character you need.

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grep -E '<DT><A|<DT><H3' bookmarks.html | sed 's/<DT>//' | sed '/Bookmarks bar/d' | sed 's/ ADD_DATE=\".*\"//g' | sed 's/^[ \t]*//' | tr '<A HREF' '<a href'
2011-05-26 22:21:01
User: chrismccoy
Functions: grep sed tr
Tags: sed grep chrome
-1
Up
Down
convert chrome html export to folders, links and descriptions

chrome only lets you export in html format, with a lot of table junk, this command will just export the titles of the links and the links without all that extra junk

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while true; do date; (curl -s -o 1.html http://www.biglion.ru/deals/ebay-80/ &); sleep 5; cat 1.html | grep "&#1082;&#1091;&#1087;&#1086;&#1085;&#1086;&#1074;" | awk -F"<div>" '{print $2}' | awk -F"<span>" '{print $1}'; done
2013-11-08 12:40:05
User: sxiii
Functions: awk cat grep sleep
Tags: biglion coupon bonus ebay
-1
Up
Down
Processes biglion quantity of sold ebay coupons/bonus codes

Processes biglion quantity of sold ebay coupons/bonus codes, so you can know approximate count of users who buyed the coupons and when sales are come up again.

You can change sleep parameter so script will work slowly or faster (default is 5 seconds).

Additional requirements: curl

Standart tools used: awk, date, cat, grep (bash)

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cp -p file-you-want-backup{,_`date +%Y%m%d`} # for bash
2009-02-08 06:34:46
User: wbx
Functions: cp
-1
Up
Down
backup file. (for bash)
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find -not -empty -type f -printf "%s\n" | sort | uniq -d | parallel find -type f -size {}c | parallel md5sum | sort | uniq -w32 --all-repeated=separate
2010-01-28 08:40:18
User: unixmonkey8046
Functions: find md5sum sort uniq
Tags: xargs parallel
-1
Up
Down
Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)

A bit shorter and parallelized. Depending on the speed of your cpu and your disk this may run faster.

Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

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year=2010; math=`echo "$year%4" | bc`; [ ! -z $year ] && [ $math -eq 0 ] && echo "$year is leap year!" || echo "$year isn't leap year";
2010-03-30 15:33:00
User: mvrilo
Functions: echo
Tags: echo bc math
-1
Up
Down
Leap year calculation
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wget -qO - http://i18n.counter.li.org/ | grep 'users registered' | sed 's/.*\<font size=7\>//g' | tr '\>' ' ' | sed 's/<br.*//g' | tr ' ' '\0'
2010-10-07 03:19:17
User: hunterm
Functions: grep sed tr wget
Tags: Linux sed wget tr counter
-1
Up
Down
Get the amount of currently registered users from i18n.counter.li.org.
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ls -lad
2013-04-03 09:58:31
User: techie
Functions: ls
Tags: ls
-1
Up
Down
Find out the permissions of the current directory

This will show you the permissions on the directory you are currently in

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w
2009-03-24 16:03:28
User: haivu
-1
Up
Down
Show who are logging in and what their current commands

Short and sweet command. This command is also useful for other information such as what IP address a particular user logged in from, how long had they been logged in, what shell do they use.

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du -kd | egrep -v "/.*/" | sort -n
2010-03-30 15:40:35
User: rmbjr60
Functions: du egrep sort
Tags: bash disk usage sort du grep
-1
Up
Down
easily find megabyte eating files or directories

Thanks for the submit! My alternative produces summaries only for directories. The original post additionally lists all files in the current directory. Sometimes the files, they just clutter up the output. Once the big directory is located, *then* worry about which file(s) are consuming so much space.

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mount | grep "mount point"
2011-01-31 10:21:09
User: mimivx
Functions: grep mount
-1
Up
Down
find the device when you only know the mount point
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mmv "*-*.mp3" "#1.mp3"
2011-03-06 13:41:54
User: houghi
-1
Up
Down
Batch file suffix renaming

replace the "-" by the character you wish. If you have multiple extentions, like jpef, jpg and JPG you could use

mmv "*-*.*" "#1.#3"
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awk 'BEGIN {srand} /^[a-z]{4,8}$/ {w[i++]=$0} END {while (j++<4) print w[int(rand*i)]}' /usr/share/dict/words
2011-08-18 02:09:42
User: putnamhill
Functions: awk
Tags: awk xkcd
-1
Up
Down
Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password

If you do not have shuf or an -R option in sort, you can fall back on awk. This provides maximum portability IMO. The command first collects words from the dictionary that match the criteria - in this case: lower case words with no punctuation that are 4 to 8 characters long. It then prints 4 random entries. I decided to print each word on a separate line to improve readability.

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Check the Description below.
2010-10-07 04:22:32
User: hunterm
Tags: bash Linux wget curl awesome counter epic one liner
-1
Up
Down
Add together the count of users from the international Linux Counter and the dudalibre.com counter.

The command was too long for the command box, so here it is:

echo $(( `wget -qO - http://i18n.counter.li.org/ | grep 'users registered' | sed 's/.*\<font size=7\>//g' | tr '\>' ' ' | sed 's/<br.*//g' | tr ' ' '\0'` + `curl --silent http://www.dudalibre.com/gnulinuxcounter?lang=en | grep users | head -2 | tail -1 | sed 's/.*<strong>//g' | sed 's/<\/strong>.*//g'` ))

This took me about an hour to do. It uses wget and curl because, dudalibre.com blocks wget, and wget worked nicely for me.

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ack --java '\\u.?.?.?[^0-9a-fA-F]'
2012-06-06 08:31:56
User: hfs
Tags: java ack unicode
-1
Up
Down
Find invalid \uxxxx Unicode escape sequences in Java source code

Get 'ack' now at http://betterthangrep.com/

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du -sh * | sort -h
2015-09-14 10:24:06
User: sergeylukin
Functions: du sort
Tags: directories list sorted
-1
Up
Down
List directories sorted by size
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/sbin/lspci (-v is verbose)
2010-07-02 15:27:37
User: tyjuan79
-1
Up
Down
FINDING PCI DEVICES
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:%s!^!foo!
2011-04-13 11:57:18
User: miccaman
Tags: vim
-1
Up
Down
vim insert at beginning of multiple lines
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wget -qO- -U '' 'google.com/search?q=weather' | grep -oP '(-)?\d{1,3}\xB0[FC]'
2012-02-28 22:27:38
User: slaufer
Functions: grep wget
-1
Up
Down
Weather

Grabs the current weather in your area (or their best guess of your area). Change the query to your zip code/location (e.g. google.com/search?q=weather+jakarta,+india) to get weather somewhere else. change google.com to google.ca or google.co.uk for metric.

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diskutil list
2012-10-06 21:18:27
User: grahamperrin
Tags: partition osx
-1
Up
Down
detect partitions

List all disks and all of their partitions on OS X. http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/diskutil.8.html

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yes 'c=(" " " " " " 0 1); printf "${c[RANDOM%5]}"' | bash
2013-11-09 16:10:41
User: stx
Functions: printf yes
Tags: random Matrix
-1
Up
Down
Binary digits Matrix effect

Adapted from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13611501/bash-version-of-c64-code-art-10-print-chr205-5rnd1-goto-10

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tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c10
2009-12-01 14:22:20
User: Phil
Functions: head tr
-1
Up
Down
generate random password

A slightly shorter version. Also doesn't put a return character at the end of the password

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