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

Calculating series with awk: add numbers from 1 to 100
"seq 100" outputs 1,2,..,100, separated by newlines. awk adds them up and displays the sum. "seq 1 2 11" outputs 1,3,..,11. Variations: 1+3+...+(2n-1) = n^2 $ seq 1 2 19 | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum}' # displays 100 1/2 + 1/4 + ... = 1 $ seq 10 | awk '{sum+=1/(2**$1)} END {print sum}' # displays 0.999023

Send a file to a pastebin from STDIN or a file, with a single function
echo "Hello world!" | sprunge # Redirect a stream to a pastebin sprunge ~/.bashrc # Send a file to a pastebin

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

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

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Safe Russian Roulette (only echo, don't delete files)
Shows "Bang!" in a chance of 1 out of 6, like in the original game with the gun (spin every round). Otherwise, echoes "Click...". If feeling brave you can also do: $[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && echo 'Bang!' && a really killer command || echo 'Click...'

A function to find the newest file in a directory
Works recusivley in the specified dir or '.' if none given. Repeatedly calls 'find' to find a newer file, when no newer files exist you have the newest. In this case 'newest' means most recently modified. To find the most recently created change -newer to -cnewer.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Slow Down Command Output
( Or $ ls -lat|lolcat -a if you like it in technicolor - apt install lolcat if needed )

Unzip multiple files with one command
With this command you can easily unzip multiple zip files with just one command. All you need to do is to use single quotes.


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: