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

find all non-html files

ls -qaltr # list directory in chronological order, most recent files at end of list
I find it very handy to be able to quickly see the most recently modified/created files in a directory. Note that the "q" option will reveal any files with non-printable characters in their filename.

Make backups recurse through directories

Generate soothing noise
Substitute 'brown' with 'pink' or 'white' according to your taste. I put this on my headphones when I'm working in an "open concept" office, where there are always three to five conversations going in earshot, or if I'm working somewhere it is "rude" of me to tell a person to turn off their cubicle radio.

Scan a gz file for non-printable characters and display each line number and line that contains them.
Scans the file once to build a list of line numbers that contain non-printable characters Scans the file again, passing those line numbers to sed as two commands to print the line number and the line itself. Also passes the output through a tr to replace the characters with a ?

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Joker wants an email if the Brand X server is down. Set a cron job for every 5 mins with this line and he gets an email when/if a ping takes longer than 3 seconds.

Close a hanging ssh session
~ is the ssh control character. If you type it after a newline, you can example force close the ssh session. , ~, then . If you want more info, type ~? when you are connecting using ssh. Very useful to kill of any hanging ssh sessions when nothing else works.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

View all images
So you are in directory with loads of pictures laying around and you need to quickly scan through them all

Check if you partition are aligned
To get most of you HDD/SSD driver you need to make sure you partition are aligned, if not the speed penalty can be up to 50% slower! this simple one liner will check to see if each partition start sector is divided by 512 you need to change sda with your driver if you find the one of your partitions is not aligned use gparted to move the start sector of the partition to be divided of 512


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: