Commands using sort (800)

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

encode HTML entities
Encodes HTML entities from input (file or stdin) so it's possible to directly past the result to a blog or HTML source file.

rename a file to its md5sum

Merge PDFs with Ghostscript wrapped in a function
This is an expansion on a previous entry, which I've wrapped in a function and placed in my profile. The "$@" is a positional parameter, much like "$*", but the parameters are passed on intact, without interpretation or expansion; so you can simply call the function like this: mergepdf * This will output a merged PDF of all PDFs in the current directory. Alternatively, you can simply list them like so: mergepdf 00.pdf 01.pdf 02.pdf ... N.B. Passing a wildcard will merge all PDFs in the current directory in name order, e.g. 00.pdf 01.pdf aa.pdf ab.pdf

List all authors of a particular git project
List everyone who committed to a particular project, listed alphabetically. To list by commits, add -n to the shortlog.

Rename files in batch

Delete all files older than X in given path
This will find all files under the path "." which are older than 10 days, and delete them. If you wish to use the "rm" command instead, replace "-delete" with "-exec rm [options] {} \;"

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

Fill the screen with randomly colored lines
This one-liner fills the screen with randomly colored lines.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested


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: