Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. 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.


If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

World cup college
Hide

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:

Hide

News

2010-03-18 - Top 10 commands explained
There's a great article by Peteris Krumins explaining the current top 10 commands: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/top-ten-one-liners-from-commandlinefu-explained/
2010-03-03 - Commandlinefu @ SXSW 2010
Am going to be at SXSW this year, in case you want to submit any CLI nuggets or suggestions to me in person. Ping me on the @codeinthehole Twitter account.
2009-09-12 - Email updates now available
You can now enable email updates to let you know each time you're command is commented on.
2009-07-11 - API and javascript blog widget now available
A simple API has been released, allowing commands to be retrieved in various formats. This also allows commands to be embedded on blogs/homepages.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Commands tagged bc

Commands tagged bc from sorted by
Terminal - Commands tagged bc - 12 results
seq 8 | awk '{print "e(" $0 ")" }' | bc -l
2010-08-14 02:52:39
User: polar
Functions: awk bc seq
Tags: awk seq bc
0

If you want a sequence that can be plotted, do:

seq 8 | awk '{print "e(" $0 ")" }' | bc -l | awk '{print NR " " $0}'

Other bc functions include s (sine), c (cosine), l (log) and j (bessel). See the man page for details.

echo "($(date +%s)-$(date +%s -d "march 1"))/86400"|bc
2010-07-22 19:44:50
User: nickwe
Functions: echo
Tags: echo bc date
1

Exactly the same number of characters, exactly the same results, but with bc

echo 'obase=16; C+F' | bc
2010-04-14 20:35:31
User: rkulla
Functions: echo
Tags: hex bc math asm
3

To do hex to binary: echo 'ibase=16; obase=2; 16*16' | bc # prints: 111100100

To do 16*16 from decimal to hex: echo 'ibase=10; obase=16; 16*16' | bc # prints: 100

You get the idea... Alternatively, run bc in interactive mode (see man page)

year=2010; math=`echo "$year%4" | bc`; [ ! -z $year ] && [ $math -eq 0 ] && echo "$year is leap year!" || echo "$year isn't leap year";
echo $((3.0/5.0))
echo "5 k 3 5 / p" | dc
2009-09-03 00:21:54
User: xamaco
Functions: echo
0

using bc is for sissies. dc is much better :-D

Polish notation will rule the world...

bc -l <<< s(3/5)
2009-09-02 15:41:39
User: akg240
Functions: bc
3

-l auto-selects many more digits (but you can round/truncate in your head, right) plus it loads a few math functions like sin().

echo "scale=4; 3 / 5" | bc
2009-08-21 21:51:46
User: foob4r
Functions: echo
3

allows you to use floating point operations in shell scripts

echo $( du -sm /var/log/* | cut -f 1 ) | sed 's/ /+/g'
2009-07-31 21:42:53
User: flux
Functions: cut du echo sed
Tags: echo bc
2

When you've got a list of numbers each on its row, the ECHO command puts them on a simple line, separated by space. You can then substitute the spaces with an operator. Finally, pipe it to the BC program.

? () { echo "$*" | bc -l; }
2009-06-28 20:15:30
User: fizz
Functions: bc echo
32

defines a handy function for quick calculations from cli.

once defined:

? 10*2+3
echo "obase=2; 27" | bc -l
2009-03-25 09:54:50
User: polar
Functions: bc echo
Tags: bc
18

Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing

"ibase=16; obase=8; F2A"

to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

echo "$math_expr" | bc -l
2009-03-25 09:46:01
User: polar
Functions: bc echo
Tags: bc
2

Useful for quick calculations at the command line. $math_expr is any arithmetic expression (see sample output):

4.5*16+3^2

s(3.1415926/2)

More options in the bc man page.