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

burn an ISO image to writable CD
Does life get much easier? Read up about wodim for an understanding of its origins in relation to the older `cdrecord` utility

List Threads by Pid along with Thread Start Time
This command will list all threads started by a particular pid along with the start time of each thread. This is very valuable when diagnosing thread leaks.

Rename files in batch

Remote screenshot
Say if you're logged into a remote system via ssh and this system has an x window system, but yet you still want a screen shot of what's going on graphically. This will do it for you. :-)

display a smiling smiley if the command succeeded and a sad smiley if the command failed
you could save the code between if and fi to a shell script named smiley.sh with the first argument as and then do a smiley.sh to see if the command succeeded. a bit needless but who cares ;)

convert a line to a space

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase
The simplest way I know.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Display all shell functions set in the current shell environment
Uses the shell builtin `declare` with the '-f' flag to output only functions to grep out only the function names. You can use it as an alias or function like so: alias shfunctions="builtin declare -f | command grep --color=never -E '^[a-zA-Z_]+\ \(\)'" shfunctions () { builtin declare -f | command grep --color=never -E '^[a-zA-Z_]+\ \(\)'; }

Copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local machine
This command will copy files and directories from a remote machine to the local one. Ensure you are in the local directory you want to populate with the remote files before running the command. To copy a directory and it's contents, you could: $ ssh user@host "(cd /path/to/a/directory ; tar cvf - ./targetdir)" | tar xvf - This is especially useful on *nix'es that don't have 'scp' installed by default.


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: