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

Count the number of characters in each line

watch your network load on specific network interface
-n means refresh frequency you could change eth0 to any interface you want, like wlan0

Retrofit a shebang to an existing script
Function to add a shebang to an existing script, handy if you forgot to add it in the first place.

Finds all files from / on down over specified size.
Very useful for finding all files over a specified size, such as out of control log files chewing up all available disk space. Fedora Core x specific version.

GREP a PDF file.
This is a good alternative to pdf2text for Ubuntu. To install it: sudo apt-get install python-pdfminer

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

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

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.

Rips CDs (Playstation, etc.) and names the files the same as the volume name

find geographical location of an ip address
I save this to bin/iptrace and run "iptrace ipaddress" to get the Country, City and State of an ip address using the http://ipadress.com service. I add the following to my script to get a tinyurl of the map as well: URL=`lynx -dump http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/?QRY=$1|grep details|awk '{print $2}'` lynx -dump http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url=$URL|grep tinyurl|grep "19. http"|awk '{print $2}'


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: