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

Another Matrix Style Implementation
A bit different from some of the other submissions. Has bold and uses all c printable characters. Change the bs=value to speed up and increase the sizes of the bold and non-bold strings.

use SHIFT + ALT to toggle between two keyboard layouts
change the last two-character abbreviation to any layout abbreviation you want. This command will only run in the current session, add to your ~/.bashrc to make this permanent.

Load average + API google chart
limite = threshold

re-assign line numbers

Google Spell Checker
I took matthewbauer's cool one-liner and rewrote it as a shell function that returns all the suggestions or outputs "OK" if it doesn't find anything wrong. It should work on ksh, zsh, and bash. Users that don't have tee can leave that part off like this: $spellcheck(){ typeset y=$@;curl -sd "$y" https://google.com/tbproxy/spell|sed -n '/s="[1-9]"/{s/]*>/ /g;s/\t/ /g;s/ *\(.*\)/Suggestions: \1\n/g;p}';}

Find files changed between dates defined by ctime of two files specified by name
This command finds all the files whose status has changed between the ctime of the older and newer . Very useful if you can see from an ls listing a block of consecutive files you want to move or delete, but can't figure out exactly the time range by date.

Don't spam root. Log your cronjob output to syslog
This command will log the output of your simple cronjobs to syslog, and syslog will take it from there. Works great for monitoring scripts which only produce simple output. Advantages: * This can be used by regular users, without modifying system files like /etc/syslog.conf * Reduce cron spam to root@localhost (Please stop spaming the sysadmins) * Uses common tools like syslog (and logrotate) so that you don't need to maintain yet another krufty logfile. * Still ensures that the output is logged somewhere, for posterity. Perhaps it's stored the secure, central syslog server, for example. * Seems to work fine on Ubuntu, CentOS, FreeBSD & MacOSX

Shows you how many hours of avi video you have.
midentify.sh is part of mplayer, but you might have to locate it on your box.

find and delete empty dirs, start in current working dir
A quick way to find and delete empty dirs, it starts in the current working directory. If you do find . -empty -type d you will see what could be removed, or to a test run.

Your name backwards


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: