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

Temporarily suspend and unsuspend a foreground job
Press ^Z, do what you need to do on the shell, then input % to resurrect the suspended job.

Play ISO/DVD-files and activate dvd-menu and mouse menu clicks.

Create a list of binary numbers
If you should happen to find yourself needing some binary numbers, this is a quickie way of doing it. If you need more digits, just add more "{0..1}" sequences for each digit you need. You can assign them to an array, too, and access them by their decimal equivalent for a quickie binary to decimal conversion (for larger values it's probably better to use another method). Note: this works in bash, ksh and zsh. For zsh, though, you'll need to issue a setopt KSH_ARRAYS to make the array zero-based. $ binary=({0..1}{0..1}{0..1}{0..1}) $ echo ${binary[9]}

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Convert spaces in file names to underscores

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Apply, in parallel, a bc expression to CSV
Define a function that applies bc, the *nix calculator, with the specified expression to all rows of the input CSV. The first column is mapped to {1}, second one to {2}, and so forth. See sample output for an example. This function uses all available cores thanks to GNU Parallel. Requires GNU Parallel

Generate random IP addresses
It never ends

chmod - change file permissions of a file to be similar of another

Hiding password while reading it from keyboard
Allow to read password in a script without showing the password inserted by the user


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: