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

Google's Text-To-Speech in command line
Improved google text-to-speech function. Allows to specify language, plays sound in terminal. Automatically removes downloaded file after successfully processing. Usage: $ say LANGUAGE TEXT Examples: $ say en "This is a test." $ say pl "To jest test"

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

PRINT LINE the width of screen or specified using any char including Colors, Escapes and metachars
One of the first functions programmers learn is how to print a line. This is my 100% bash builtin function to do it, which makes it as optimal as a function can be. The COLUMNS environment variable is also set by bash (including bash resetting its value when you resize your term) so its very efficient. I like pretty-output in my shells and have experimented with several ways to output a line the width of the screen using a minimal amount of code. This is like version 9,000 lol. This function is what I use, though when using colors or other terminal features I create separate functions that call this one, since this is the lowest level type of function. It might be better named printl(), but since I use it so much it's more optimal to have the name contain less chars (both for my programming and for the internal workings). If you do use terminal escapes this will reset to default. $ tput sgr0 For implementation ideas, check my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

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"

Pretty Print a simple csv in the command line
Splits the input based on commas and prints it in a nice column format. This would not work for CSV rows that have "," between quotes or with newline characters. Use only simple simple csv files.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Export unpushed files list

Send email with one or more binary attachments
This command uses mutt to send the mail. You must pipe in a body, otherwise mutt will prompt you for some stuff. If you don't have mutt, it should be dead easy to install.

Spawn a retro style terminal emulator.
Just note that ctrl+shift+t to make new tabs will not work with . Pair it with a terminal multiplexer like for the best experience.

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"


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: