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

Transform a portrait pdf in a landscape one with 2 pages per page
This is an example of the usage of pdfnup (you can find it in the 'pdfjam' package). With this command you can save ink/toner and paper (and thus trees!) when you print a pdf. This tools are very configurable, and you can make also 2x2, 3x2, 2x3 layouts, and more (the limit is your fantasy and the resolution of the printer :-) You must have installed pdfjam, pdflatex, and the LaTeX pdfpages package in your box.

Create a new file

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Use Linux coding style in C program
put "-linux" option into $HOME/.indent.pro to make it default

resolve hostname to IP our vice versa with less output
inverted version: resolveip -s 216.34.181.xxx freshmeat.net

In (any) vi, add a keystroke to format the current paragraph.
That goes into your $HOME/.exrc file. " Nice macro to reformat lines: map ^A !}fmt Note that the ^A has to be input by typing ^V^A.

Fork Bomb for Windows
Quick and dirty forkbomb for all flavors of windows Do not use in production. Replace start with a command of your choice, this will just open a new command prompt and is pretty tricky to stop once started

Insert the last argument of the previous command
for example if you did a: $ ls -la /bin/ls then $ ls !$ is equivalent to doing a $ ls /bin/ls

All what exists in dir B and not in dir A will be copied from dir B to new or existing dir C
Assumed dir A, B, C are subdirs of the current dir Exact syntax of the command is: rsync -v -r --size-only --compare-dest=/path_to_A/A/ /path_to_B/B/ /path_to_C/C/ (do not omit end-slashes, since that would copy only the names and not the contents of subdirs of dir B to dir C) You can replace --size-only with --checksum for more thorough file differences validation Useful switch: -n, --dry-run perform a trial run with no changes made

Produce 10 copies of the same string


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: