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

get all pdf and zips from a website using wget
If the site uses https, use: $ wget --reject html,htm --accept pdf,zip -rl1 --no-check-certificate https-url

How to establish a remote Gnu screen session that you can re-connect to
Long before tabbed terminals existed, people have been using Gnu screen to open many shells in a single text terminal. Combined with ssh, it gives you the ability to have many open shells with a single remote connection using the above options. If you detach with "Ctrl-a d" or if the ssh session is accidentally terminated, all processes running in your remote shells remain undisturbed, ready for you to reconnect. Other useful screen commands are "Ctrl-a c" (open new shell) and "Ctrl-a a" (alternate between shells). Read this quick reference for more screen commands: http://aperiodic.net/screen/quick_reference

Copy ssh keys to user@host to enable password-less ssh logins.
To generate the keys use the command ssh-keygen

play high-res video files on a slow processor
Certain codecs in high res don't play so well on my Dell Mini 9. Using this command, I can play just about anything and it keeps the sound in sync to boot!

get diskusage of files modified during the last n days
get diskusage of files (in this case logfiles in /var/log) modified during the last n days: $ sudo find /var/log/ -mtime -n -type f | xargs du -ch n -> last modified n*24 hours ago Numeric arguments can be specified as +n for greater than n, -n for less than n, n for exactly n. => so 7*24 hours (about 7 days) is -7 $ sudo find /var/log/ -mtime -7 -type f | xargs du -ch | tail -n1

Send command to all terminals in a screen session

Automatically download Ubuntu 10.04 when available
Tested with 9.10 release. Choose whatever torrent client you prefer.

Stores the certificate expiration date on the variable A
Stores the certificate expiration date on the variable A

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Skip banner on ssh login prompt
This allows you to skip the banner (usually /etc/issue.net) on ssh connections. Useful to avoid banners outputted to your mail by rsync cronjobs.


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: