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

Summary of disk usage, excluding other filesystems, summarised and sorted by size
This command is useful for finding out which directories below the current location use the most space. It is summarised by directory and excludes mounted filesystems. Finally it is sorted by size.

extract all urls from firefox sessionstore
This will extract all of the urls from a firefox session (including urls in a tab's history). The sessionstore.js file is in ~/.mozilla/firefox/{firefox profile}

Edit a PDF's metadata using exiftool
Edit the pdf file foo.pdf's metadata. -overwrite_original overwrites the original file (w/o it exiftool creates a new file)

Schedule a script or command in x num hours, silently run in the background even if logged out
doesn't require "at", change the "2h" to whatever you want... (deafult unit for sleep is seconds)

Audible warning when a downloading is finished
This command can be set as an alias in ~/.bashrc For example (in my case) I have : alias watchDl='while [ "$(ls $filePart)" != "" ]; do sleep 5; done; mpg123 /home/.../warning.mp3" ' Then I just need to - initialize filePart (e.g. filePart="*bigFile*rar.part") - launch watchDl

Find the package that installed a command

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

MP3 player
I tried a few curses based mp3 players for playing back choir practice songs for my wife. Unfortunately none of the ones I tried were capable of scrubbing a track. Firefox saves the day.

(Git) Revert files with changed mode, not content
I sometimes (due to mismanagement!) end up with files in a git repo which have had their modes changed, but not their content. This one-liner lets me revert the mode changes, while leaving changed-content files be, so I can commit just the actual changes made.


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: