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 the Volume labels all bitlocker volumes had before being encrypted
Get information of volume labels of bitlocker volumes, even if they are encrypted and locked (no access to filesystem, no password provided). Note that the volume labels can have spaces, but only if you name then before encryption. Renaming a bitlocker partition after being encrypted does not have the same effect as doing it before.

Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there
Sometimes in a script you want to make sure that a directory is in the path, and add it in if it's not already there. In this example, $dir contains the new directory you want to add to the path if it's not already present. There are multiple ways to do this, but this one is a nice clean shell-internal approach. I based it on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1397020. You can also do it using tr to separate the path into lines and grep -x to look for exact matches, like this: $ if ! $(echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://stackoverflow.com/a/5048977. Or replace the "echo | tr" part with a shell parameter expansion, like $ if ! $(echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3209/. There are also other more regex-y ways to do it, but I find the ones listed here easiest to follow. Note some of this is specific to the bash shell.

Grep inside Vim and navigate results
Will search for the given pattern and build a list of occurrences. Then you can use :copen and :cclose to toggle the list. When browsing the list, ENTER will take you to that line in the file.

Remove newlines from output
Pipe any output to "grep ." and blank lines will not be printed.

Open a file with specified application.
This command require mac os x.

Determine if photos have been rotated to portrait orientation instead of normal landscape orientation
Most people take photos in landscape orientation (wider than it is tall). Sometimes though you turn the camera sideways to capture a narrow/tall subject. Assuming you then manually rotate those picture files 90 degrees for proper viewing on screen or photo frame, you now have a mix of orientations in your photos directory. This command will print out the names of all the photos in the current directory whose vertical resolution is larger than its horizontal resolution (i.e. portrait orientation). You can then take that list of files and deal with them however you need to, like re-rotating back to landscape for consistent printing with all the others. This command requires the "identify" command from the ImageMagick command-line image manipulation suite. Sample output from identify: $ identify PICT2821.JPG PICT2821.JPG JPEG 1536x2048 1536x2048+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 688KB 0.016u 0:00.006

easily find megabyte eating files or directories
sorts the files by integer megabytes, which should be enough to (interactively) find the space wasters. Now you can $ dush for the above output, $ dush -n 3 for only the 3 biggest files and so on. It's always a good idea to have this line in your .profile or .bashrc

Perl Command Line Interpreter
Read, Evaluate, Print, Loop - REPL

Continuously show wifi signal strength on a mac
The closer to zero the better.Credit to TheSeb on macrumors: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1289884

Get IP from hostname


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: