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

Show a passive popup in KDE
Display a passive popup during seconds. Additionnaly, --title can be used to set the title of the popup. This is a nice way to communicate with a desktop user of a machine you have an SSH access on : DISPLAY=:0 sudo -u $user -H kdialog --passivepopup "Hello you" 10 --title "cli IM"

Get a docker container's run command line
A good way to build a new container when you don't remember how you did it the first time

list files recursively by size

Run the Firefox Profile Manager
even when another instance is already open. Great for testing purposes when you need to be 2 people at once on the same site.

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

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Get length of current playlist in xmms2

Encode file path to URL
Really helpfull when play with files having spaces an other bad name. Easy to store and access names and path in just a field while saving it in a file. This format (URL) is directly supported by nautilus and firefox (and other browsers)

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.


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: