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

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
Backups all MySQL databases to individual files. Can be put into a script that grabs current date so you have per day backups.

Run a long job and notify me when it's finished
You will need libnotify-bin for this to work: $ sudo aptitude install libnotify-bin

Write on the console without being registered
just use a space to prevent commands from being recorded in bash's history on most systems

Play awesome rythmic noise using aplay
Try modifying the numbers in the "(i*(i>>8|i>>9)&46&i>>8))^(i&i>>13|i>>6)" part. Crudely stolen from http://www.xkcdb.com/9067

Random IPv4 address

Watch a movie in linux without the X windows system.

Script Terminal Session
script -f /tmp/foo will place all output of the terminal, including carriage returns, to a file. This file can be tail dash-eff'ed by one or more other terminals to display the information of the main terminal. Good way to share one's screen on short notice. Note: This produces a very accurate output, but that includes depending on the size of your terminal to be the same. You can clear screens or even resize the terminal for others using this function; I use it in conjunction with the "mid" command in my list.

Video Google download
Download google video with wget. Or, if you wish, pass video URL to ie mplayer to view as stream. 1. VURL: replace with url. I.e. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=12312312312312313# 2. OUPUT_FILE : optionally change to a more suited name. This is the downloaded file. I.e. foo.flv # Improvements greatly appreciated. (close to my first linux command after ls -A :) ) Breakedown pipe by pipe: 1. wget: html from google, pass to stdout 2. grep: get the video url until thumbnailUrl (not needed) 3. grep: Strip off everything before http:// 4. sed: urldecode 5. echo: hex escapes 6. sed: stipr of tailing before thumbnailUrl 7. wget: download. Here one could use i.e. mplayer or other...

Copy your SSH public key on a remote machine for passwordless login - the easy way

Strace all signals processes based on a name ( The processes already started... ) with bash built-in
Especially for sysadmins when they don't want to waste time to add -p flag on the N processes of a processname. In the old school, you did ; $ pgrep processname and typing strace -f -p 456 -p 678 -p 974... You can add -f argument to the function. That way, the function will deal with pgrep to match the command-line. Example : $ processname -f jrockit


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: