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" }

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Create package dependency graph
Create Debian package dependency graph using GraphViz

Label EXT2/EXT3 File System

List packages manually installed with process currently running
Sometimes we install programs, we forget about them, and they stay there wasting RAM. This one-liner try to find them.

Instant mirror from your laptop + webcam (fullscreen+grab)
This directly puts the "mirror" into fullscreen, and lets you take photos by pressing the 's' key. I bet appearance conscious people will have keyboard shortcut for this command by now.

Viewable terminal session over network.
connect to it with any network command (including web browser - if you don't mind weird formatting) curl 127.0.0.1:9876 nc 127.0.0.1 9876

Perl one-liner to determine number of days since the Unix epoch
There are some environments that use this value for password and account expiration. It's helpful to be able to quickly determine the number of days since the Unix epoch (dse) when working directly with the configuration files as an administrator.

move up through directories faster (set in your /etc/profile or .bash_profile)
Usage: $ up N I did not like two things in the submitted commands and fixed it here: 1) If I do cd - afterwards, I want to go back to the directory I've been before 2) If I call up without argument, I expect to go up one level It is sad, that I need eval (at least in bash), but I think it's safe here. eval is required, because in bash brace expansion happens before variable substitution, see http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Repeat_a_string#Using_printf

Using netcat to copy files between servers
It bypasses encryption overhead of SSH and depending on configuration can be significantly faster. It's recommended to use only in trusted networks.


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: