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.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

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

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

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Commands using wget from sorted by
Terminal - Commands using wget - 249 results
wget -qO - http://example.com/path/to/blah.tar.gz | tar xzf -
2010-02-15 04:00:29
User: TuxOtaku
Functions: tar wget
17
Up
Down
download and unpack tarball without leaving it sitting on your hard drive
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q -U busybox -O- "http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF8&q=define%3A$1" | tr '<' '\n' | sed -n 's/^li>\(.*\)/\1\n/p'
2010-02-01 13:01:47
User: hackerb9
Functions: sed tr wget
Tags: sed wget tr google busybox
0
Up
Down
Define words with google. (busybox version)

This is a minimalistic version of the ubiquitious Google definition screen scraper. This version was designed not only to run fast, but to work using BusyBox. BusyBox is a collection of basic Unix tools that have been compiled into a single binary to save space on tiny installations of Unix. For example, although my phone doesn't have perl or the GNU utilities, it does have BusyBox's stripped down versions of wget, tr, and sed. It turns out that those tools suffice for many tasks.

Known Bugs: This script does not handle HTML entities at all. I don't think there's an easy way to do that within BusyBox, but I'd love to see it if someone could do it. Also, this script can only define a single word, not phrases. (Well, you could if you typed in %20, but that'd be gross.) Lastly, this script does not show the URL where definitions were found. Given the randomness of the Net, that last bit of information is often key.

Show sample output | Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -rc -A.flac --tries=5 http://archive.org/the/url/of/the/album
2010-01-20 07:36:25
User: meunierd
Functions: wget
Tags: music internet archive
0
Up
Down
Download full FLAC albums from archive.org

The only zipped version of an album available for download is the lossy mp3 version. To download lossless files, because of their size, you must download them individually. This command scrapes the page for all the FLAC (or also SHN) files.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wtzc () { wget "$@"; foo=`echo "$@" | sed 's:.*/::'`; tar xzvf $foo; blah=`echo $foo | sed 's:,*/::'`; bar=`echo $blah | sed -e 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/' -e 's/\(.*\)\..*/\1/'`; cd $bar; ls; }
2010-01-17 11:25:47
User: oshazard
Functions: cd sed tar wget
-1
Up
Down
wget, tar xzvf, cd, ls

Combines a few repetitive tasks when compiling source code. Especially useful when a hypen in a file-name breaks tab completion.

1.) wget source.tar.gz

2.) tar xzvf source.tar.gz

3.) cd source

4.) ls

From there you can run ./configure, make and etc.

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -r -l1 -np -nd http://yoururl.com/yourfolder/
2010-01-14 16:22:44
User: tanj
Functions: wget
1
Up
Down
download the contents of a remote folder in the current local folder
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget http://domain.com/file{1..100}
2010-01-12 14:28:04
User: wincus
Functions: wget
Tags: bash bash tricks
5
Up
Down
download file1 file2 file3 file4 .... file 100
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -H -r ?level=1 -k -p http://www.domain.com/folder/
2009-12-27 05:23:27
User: svnlabs
Functions: wget
-2
Up
Down
wget ? server to server files transfer

wget ? server to server files transfer

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -O - http://example.com/a.gz | tar xz
2009-12-20 02:38:12
User: pornel
Functions: tar wget
4
Up
Down
Extract tarball from internet without local saving

Use `tar xj` for bzip2 archives.

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q -O - http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ | grep ^127 >> /etc/hosts
2009-12-14 17:11:16
User: torrid
Functions: grep wget
5
Up
Down
Block the 6700 worst spamhosts

The above url contains over 6700 of the common ad websites. The command just pastes these into your /etc/hosts.

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -qO - http://cfaj.freeshell.org/ipaddr.cgi
2009-12-10 04:34:57
User: cfajohnson
Functions: wget
-2
Up
Down
Get your public ip
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q http://dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random/ -O-| sed -n '/<img src="http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics/{s/.*\(http:.*\)" t.*/\1/;p}' | awk '{system ("wget -q " $1 " -O- | display -title $(basename " $1") -write /tmp/$(basename " $1")");}'
2009-12-09 13:41:25
User: laugg
Functions: awk sed wget
Tags: sed awk wget comic
0
Up
Down
View a random xkcd comic

Only need to install Image Magick package.

Display a xkcd comic with its title and save it in /tmp directory

If you prefer to view the newest xkcd, use this command:

wget -q http://xkcd.com/ -O-| sed -n '/<img src="http:\/\/imgs.xkcd.com\/comics/{s/.*\(http:.*\)" t.*/\1/;p}' | awk '{system ("wget -q " $1 " -O- | display -title $(basename " $1") -write /tmp/$(basename " $1")");}'
Comments (1) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -O - -q http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/abba/takeachanceonme.html | sed -e 's/[cC]hance/dump/g' > ~/tdom.htm && firefox ~/tdom.htm
2009-12-04 22:56:00
User: tighe
Functions: sed wget
0
Up
Down
Make ABBA better (requires firefox)

ABBA would be more entertaining if they sang this.

Comments (2) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget `lynx --dump http://xkcd.com/|grep png`
2009-12-03 23:10:22
User: metalx1000
Functions: grep wget
Tags: bash wget lynx curl function xkcd comic webcomic
1
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -t inf -k -r -l 3 -p -m http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
2009-12-03 10:27:57
User: ninadsp
Functions: wget
3
Up
Down
Mirror the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive

Mirror the entire NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive, all the way from 1995. The archive is close to 2.5 GB, with lots of files, so give it some time. The logs can be redirected to a file using '-o somefile'. You might also want to try '-nH' and the '--cut-dirs' options

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
xkcd(){ wget -qO- http://xkcd.com/|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
2009-11-27 09:11:47
User: eightmillion
Functions: grep tee wget
Tags: bash curl function xkcd comic webcomic
24
Up
Down
View the newest xkcd comic.

This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic.

To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following:

xkcdrandom(){ wget -qO- dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?<=")http://imgs[^/]+/comics/[^"]+\.\w{3}'))|grep -Po '(?<=(\w{3})" title=").*(?=" alt)';}
Comments (11) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
while true; do wget -r -l1 --no-clobber -A.txt http://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html; done; cat *.txt | grep pass
2009-11-26 23:38:44
User: Cowboy
Functions: cat grep wget
-5
Up
Down
Passwords from 9/11 tragedy pager intercepts (Yeah! Plain text! From wikileaks.net)

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a7xpt/conspiracy_theories_commence_wikileaks_to_release/

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -qO - http://www.sputnick-area.net/ip;echo
2009-11-20 23:10:31
User: cfajohnson
Functions: wget
Tags: Network IP external
0
Up
Down
Get your external IP address
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q -O - `youtube-dl -b -g $url`| ffmpeg -i - -f mp3 -vn -acodec libmp3lame -| mpg123 -
2009-11-07 13:45:13
User: torrid
Functions: mpg123 wget
15
Up
Down
Play music from youtube without download
Show sample output | Comments (5) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.org|sed -e 's/.*Current IP Address: //' -e 's/<.*$//'
2009-11-06 10:18:26
User: sanjaygoel
Functions: sed wget
Tags: Network IP external
-4
Up
Down
Get your external IP address
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -O - -q ip.boa.nu
2009-11-04 22:22:04
User: xeor
Functions: wget
Tags: Network IP external
-6
Up
Down
Get your external IP address

Using our beloved wget

Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
clfavs(){ URL="http://www.commandlinefu.com";wget -O - --save-cookies c --post-data "username=$1&password=$2&submit=Let+me+in" $URL/users/signin;for i in `seq 0 25 $3`;do wget -O - --load-cookies c $URL/commands/favourites/plaintext/$i >>$4;done;rm -f c;}
2009-09-30 16:43:08
User: suhasgupta
Functions: c++ wget
Tags: wget commandlinefu
24
Up
Down
backup all your commandlinefu.com favourites to a plaintext file

Usage: clfavs username password num_favourite_commands file_in_which_to_backup

Comments (8) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget 'link of a Picasa WebAlbum' -O - |perl -e'while(<>){while(s/"media":{"content":\[{"url":"(.+?\.JPG)//){print "$1\n"}}' |wget -w1 -i -
2009-09-27 14:36:27
User: aciancone
Functions: perl wget
Tags: photos download rss picasa
2
Up
Down
Go get those photos from a Picasa album
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q -O - 'http://wap.weather.gov.hk/' | sed -r 's/<[^>]+>//g;/^UV/q' | tail -n4
2009-09-25 02:36:46
User: dakunesu
Functions: sed tail wget
-1
Up
Down
get Hong Kong weather infomation from HK Observatory

"get Hong Kong weather infomation from HK Observatory

From Hong Kong Observatory wap site ;)"

other one showed alot of blank lines for me

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget -q -O - 'http://wap.weather.gov.hk/' | sed -r 's/<[^>]+>//g;/^UV/q' | grep -v '^$'
2009-09-25 02:21:05
User: twfcc
Functions: grep sed wget
-1
Up
Down
get Hong Kong weather infomation from HK Observatory

From Hong Kong Observatory wap site ;)

Show sample output | Comments (3) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate
wget http://twitter.com/help/test.json -q -O -
2009-09-15 23:22:26
User: ninadsp
Functions: wget
3
Up
Down
Ping Twitter to check if you can connect

Returns a JSON object, by connecting to the 'test' endpoint of the Twitter API. Simplest way to check if you can connect to Twitter. Output also available in XML, use '/help/test.xml' for that

Show sample output | Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious | Submit alternative | Report as a duplicate