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

Your GeoIP location on Google Maps

Find the package that installed a command

Stop long commands wrapping around and over-writing itself in the Bash shell
add the command either in /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile so that this is available to your shell.

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word password
The improvement of this command over Strawp's original alternative is that you can specify the size of the words, in this particular case words between 3 and 5 character's long. It also excludes words that contain apostrophes, if you'd rather keep those words simply substitue [^'] for .

Use top to monitor only all processes with the same name fragment 'foo'
$ pgrep foo may return several pids for process foobar footy01 etc. like this: 11427 12576 12577 sed puts "-p " in front and we pass a list to top: $ top -p 11427 -p 12576 -p 12577

Resolve the "all display buffers are busy, please try later" error on a Foundry

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Watch the size of a directory using figlet
You can substitute /home/$USER with any path you like.

Alias HEAD for automatic smart output
Run the alias command, then issue $ps aux | head and resize your terminal window (putty/console/hyperterm/xterm/etc) then issue the same command and you'll understand. $ ${LINES:-`tput lines 2>/dev/null||echo -n 12`} Insructs the shell that if LINES is not set or null to use the output from `tput lines` ( ncurses based terminal access ) to get the number of lines in your terminal. But furthermore, in case that doesn't work either, it will default to using the deafault of 12 (-2 = 10). The default for HEAD is to output the first 10 lines, this alias changes the default to output the first x lines instead, where x is the number of lines currently displayed on your terminal - 2. The -2 is there so that the top line displayed is the command you ran that used HEAD, ie the prompt. Depending on whether your PS1 and/or PROMPT_COMMAND output more than 1 line (mine is 3) you will want to increase from -2. So with my prompt being the following, I need -7, or - 5 if I only want to display the commandline at the top. ( https://www.askapache.com/linux/bash-power-prompt/ ) 275MB/748MB [7995:7993 - 0:186] 06:26:49 Thu Apr 08 [askapache@n1-backbone5:/dev/pts/0 +1] ~ $ In most shells the LINES variable is created automatically at login and updated when the terminal is resized (28 linux, 23/20 others for SIGWINCH) to contain the number of vertical lines that can fit in your terminal window. Because the alias doesn't hard-code the current LINES but relys on the $LINES variable, this is a dynamic alias that will always work on a tty device.

Create sqlite db and store image
Creates a simple sqlite db (img.db) inserts /tmp/Q.jpg on base64 an recorvers it as /tmp/W.jpg


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: