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

Rank top 10 most frequently used commands

find and remove old compressed backup files
remove all compressed files in /home/ folder not created in the last 10 days

Fastest Sort. Sort Faster, Max Speed
sort is way slow by default. This tells sort to use a buffer equal to half of the available free memory. It also will use multiple process for the sort equal to the number of cpus on your machine (if greater than 1). For me, it is magnitudes faster. If you put this in your bash_profile or startup file, it will be set correctly when bash is started. $ sort -S1 --parallel=2 /dev/null && alias sortfast='sort -S$(($(sed '\''/MemF/!d;s/[^0-9]*//g'\'' /proc/meminfo)/2048)) $([ `nproc` -gt 1 ]&&echo -n --parallel=`nproc`)' Alternative $ echo|sort -S10M --parallel=2 &>/dev/null && alias sortfast="command sort -S$(($(sed '/MemT/!d;s/[^0-9]*//g' /proc/meminfo)/1024-200)) --parallel=$(($(command grep -c ^proc /proc/cpuinfo)*2))"

Let keyboard LED blink

Extract icons from windows exe/dll
wrestool can be found in icoutils (http://www.nongnu.org/icoutils)

archlinux: check which repository packages have updates available
Shows which packages from the official repositories (not aur) have updates available. For most accurate output, the mirrors and package lists should be up to date.

Save a copy of all debian packages in the form in which they are installed and configured on your system
A copy of all installed debian packages on your system will be put back together, with all changes in configuration files you made and placed in the current directory. Make sure you have enough disk space (say 2-3 GB). Break any time with Ctrl+C.

Unpack .tgz File On Linux
With -a you don't care about file type (bz2, gzip, etc.)

Script executes itself on another host with one ssh command
Now put more interesting stuff on the script in replacement of hostname, even entire functions, etc, and stuff. hosta> cat myScript.sh #!/bin/sh [ $1 == "client" ] && hostname || cat $0 | ssh $1 /bin/sh -s client hosta> myScript.sh hostb hostb hosta>

return external ip
Get your ip address, hostname, ASN and geolocation information. If you want just one field as a text response you can also get that,eg curl ipinfo.io/ip


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: