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

Outputs files with ascii art in the intended form.
Files containing ascii art (e.g. with .nfo extension) are typically not correctly reproduced at the command line when using cat. With iconv one can easily write a wrapper to solve this: $ #!/bin/bash $ if [ -z "$@" ]; then echo "Usage: $(basename $0) file [file] ..." $ else iconv -f437 -tutf8 "$@"; fi $ exit 0

Play all files in the directory using MPlayer
Skip forward and back using the < and > keys. Display the file title with I.

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" }

Daemonize nc - Transmit a file like a http server
Allow to launch nc like a daemon, in background until you still stop it. You can stop it with kill %1 (jobs method) or kill PID. The -k option can force nc to listen another connection, but if you use redirection, it will work only one time. The loop's inside doesn't do anything, but we can imagine to send a message to screen when a connection is established

Find the package that installed a command

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

rsync instead of scp
The command copies a file from remote SSH host on port 8322 with bandwidth limit 100KB/sec; --progress shows a progress bar --partial turns partial download on; thus, you can resume the process if something goes wrong --bwlimit limits bandwidth by specified KB/sec --ipv4 selects IPv4 as preferred I find it useful to create the following alias: alias myscp='rsync --progress --partial --rsh="ssh -p 8322" --bwlimit=100 --ipv4' in ~/.bash_aliases, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login or ~/.bashrc where appropriate.

List upcoming events on google calendar
Requires googlecl (http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/) Even better when you wrap this in a script and allow the --date=STRING to be $1. Then you can type: whatson "next Thursday" The date string for UNIX date is very flexible. You can also add --cal "[regex]" to the end for multiple calendars.

Convert a string to

generate random tone


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: