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

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" }

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

Get a list of Mageia Linux mirrors providing rsync connectivity for Mageia 4 release
Need to find a Mageia Linux mirror server providing Mageia 4 via rsync? Modify the "url=" string for the version you want. This shows i586 which is the 32bit version. If you want the 64bit version it is: url=http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.4.x86_64.list; wget -q ${url} -O - | grep rsync:

Create a temporary file
To create directory, use: $ tempdir=$(/bin/mktemp -d)

list all file extensions in a directory
If your grep doesn't have an -o option, you can use sed instead.

Killing processes with your mouse in an infinite loop
Useful for quickly cleaning your Desktop. Nice joke if launched at startup.

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Just use '-' to use STDIN as an additional input to 'cat'

Crop video starting at 00:05:00 with duration of 20 mins

Display a Lissajous curve in text
Use Ruby's standard Curses module to display a Lissajous curve in the console. Replace the "0.2" with different numbers for different curves.

Find out my Linux distribution name and version


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: