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

Recursively remove directory with many files quickly
rsync'ing an empty directory over a directory to be deleted recursively is much faster than using rm -rf, for various reasons. Relevant only for directories with really a lot of files.

Re-read partition table on specified device without rebooting system (here /dev/sda).

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

rename files according to date created
The command renames all files in a certain directory. Renaming them to their date of creation using EXIF. If you're working with JPG that contains EXIF data (ie. from digital camera), then you can use following to get the creation date instead of stat. * Since not every file has exif data, we want to check that dst is valid before doing the rest of commands. * The output from exif has a space, which is a PITA for filenames. Use sed to replace with '-'. * Note that I use 'echo' before the mv to test out my scripts. When you're confident that it's doing the right thing, then you can remove the 'echo'... you don't want to end up like the guy that got all the files blown away. Credits: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4710753/rename-files-according-to-date-created

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Unrar multiple directories into current working directory
Grabs all rar files in any current subdirectories and feeds it to unrar. Doesn't work well with things packaged like file.part01.rar. Works best with File.rar. You can recurse into other directories by adding more /*'s

Remote screenshot
The `export` is unnecessary if it's only applicable to the one command.

Job Control
background and disown, but with a proper one-line syntax


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: