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

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line having a custom screen size
This example uses xfreerdp, which builds upon the development of rdesktop. This example usage will also send you the remote machine's sound.

Reverse SSHfs mount,
While `sshfs $REMOTE_HOST:$REMOTE_PATH $LOCAL_PATH` "pulls" a directory from the remote server to the local host, the above command does the reverse and "pushes" a directory from the local host to the remote server. This makes use of the "slave" option of sshfs which instructs it to communicate over plain stdin/stdout and the `dpipe` tool from vde2 to connect the sftp-server stdout to the sshfs stdin and vice-versa.

Play online music videos in terminal
pvl 'link1' 'link2' 'link3' Play Youtube, Vimeo, etc links without visual elements. Great for music videos when you just want the audio. You can control mplayer with this! Hit Ctrl-C twice to exit (if you're playing multiple files)

Show a Command's Short Description
The whatis command displays a short description for the command you list on the command line. It is useful to quickly learn what a command does

system beep off

Find directories over 50MB in the home directory

List dot-files and dirs, but not . or ..

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

Generate random valid mac addresses
First set the variable $hexchars: $hexchars="0123456789ABCDEF" Change the number in the first for loop if you need less then 1200 mac addresses

Create date based backups
This script creates date based backups of the files. It copies the files to the same place the original ones are but with an additional extension that is the timestamp of the copy on the following format: YearMonthDay-HourMinuteSecond


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: