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).

Display a cool clock on your terminal

Terminal - Display a cool clock on your terminal
watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet"
2009-06-21 01:02:37
User: dennisw
Functions: watch
41
Up
Down
Display a cool clock on your terminal

This command displays a clock on your terminal which updates the time every second. Press Ctrl-C to exit.

A couple of variants:

A little bit bigger text:

watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -f big"

You can try other figlet fonts, too.

Big sideways characters:

watch -n 1 -t '/usr/games/banner -w 30 $(date +%M:%S)'

This requires a particular version of banner and a 40-line terminal or you can adjust the width ("30" here).

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

Very fun, thanks. :)

Comment by topher1kenobe 208 weeks and 3 days ago

Nice.

I find that using the "-k" option makes it more readable:

$ watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -k"

Comment by mpb 208 weeks and 2 days ago

@mpb:

watch -t -n1 "date +%T|figlet -W -f big"
Comment by dennisw 208 weeks and 2 days ago

how about xclock?

Comment by bwoodacre 208 weeks and 2 days ago

now that's cool/funny

Comment by linuxrawkstar 208 weeks and 1 day ago

Wow. Very cool!

Comment by qubyte 208 weeks and 1 day ago

For some reason this doesn't work if you substitute toilet for

figlet. The command $ date +%T | toilet works. Hmmm.

Comment by bubnoff 168 weeks and 5 days ago

@bubnoff: That's because watch can't handle the UTF8 with ANSI color codes that toilet outputs. This won't work as expected either: watch ls --color-always

Comment by dennisw 168 weeks and 5 days ago

Multiline screensaver-like version that respects your locale settings:

watch -t -n1 "date +%A%n%x%n%X|figlet -t -c"
Comment by lordtoran 82 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts