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

Remove a range of lines from a file

Find recursively, from current directory down, files and directories whose names contain single or multiple whitespaces and replace each such occurrence with a single underscore.
Note the g for global in the perl expression; without it, only the first occurrence in the name would be replaced.

Create a video that is supported by youtube
Takes an mpeg video and coverts it to a youtube compatible flv file. The -r 25 sets the frame rate for PAL, for NTSC use 29.97

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

Clean up display when the bash prompt is displayed
This will cause bash to fix a garbled terminal before the prompt is printed. For example, if you cat a file with nonprintable character sequences, the terminal sometimes ends up in a mode where it only prints line drawing characters. This sequence will return the terminal to the standard character set after every command.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Prepend section dates to individual entries in a summary log file
Searches for dates on lines by themselves. Uses that date to prepend all rows that contain SEARCHSTRING with the date, until it reaches another line with a date by itself. This fixed an issue with a specific log export where there would be a date, followed by all of the entries for that date.

Display EPOCH time in human readable format using AWK.

Fetch the current human population of Earth
Fetches the world population JSON data from the US census and parses it uses jshon

Remove all HTML tags from a file
A shorter version of command #3014, using awk instead of sed. Useful when scraping websites with a script.


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: