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

Beep siren
Infinitely plays beeps with sinusoidally changing sound frequency. Ideal for alarm on an event.

Use the arguments used in the last command
Very basic, but who knows.. mkdir !$ should work too, only uses 'the last' argument. !-2 executes cd Desktop/Notes again. More tips in 'man history'

Get the SUM of visual blocked digits in vim

Protect directory from an overzealous rm -rf *
Forces the -i flag on the rm command when using a wildcard delete.

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"

Pulls email password out of Plesk database for given email address.
This simply pulls the password out of the database for the given mail name for ease of use in testing emails that you would not normally have access to.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

Make .bashrc function to backup the data you changed last houres
The original overwrites any previous backups, and only saves exactly the last hours worth, but not 1 hour + 1 minute. This version creates or appends files, and backs up everything since the last backup (using the backups timestamp as the reference), plus it uses TMPDIR if set.

delay execution of a command that needs lots of memory and CPU time until the resources are available
[ 2000 -ge "$(free -m | awk '/buffers.cache:/ {print $4}')" ] returns true if less than 2000 MB of RAM are available, so adjust this number to your needs. [ $(echo "$(uptime | awk '{print $10}' | sed -e 's/,$//' -e 's/,/./') >= $(grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo)" | bc) -eq 1 ] returns true if the current machine load is at least equal to the number of CPUs. If either of the tests returns true we wait 10 seconds and check again. If both tests return false, i.e. 2GB are available and machine load falls below number of CPUs, we start our command and save it's output in a text file. The ( ( ... ) & ) construct lets the command run in background even if we log out. See http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3115/ .

Create thumbnails and a HTML page for listing them (with links to sources)
The input images are assume to have the "JPG" extension. Mogrify will overwrite any gif images with the same name! Will not work with names with spaces.


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: