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

xargs for builtin bash commands

Apply new patch for a directory (originDir)

Recursively lists all files in the current directory, except the ones in '.snapshot' directory
This can be useful for those who have mounted NetApp file-systems with snapshot activated.

Quickly generate an MD5 hash for a text string using OpenSSL
Here Strings / A variant of here documents, the format is:

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"

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.

Write a listing of all directories and files on the computer to a compressed file.
This command is meant to be used to make a lightweight backup, for when you want to know which files might be missing or changed, but you don't care about their contents (because you have some way to recover them). Explanation of parts: "ls -RFal /" lists all files in and below the root directory, along with their permissions and some other metadata. I think sudo is necessary to allow ls to read the metadata of certain files. "| gzip" compresses the result, from 177 MB to 16 MB in my case. "> all_files_list.txt.gz" saves the result to a file in the current directory called all_files_list.txt.gz. This name can be changed, of course.

Create a pdf version of a manpage
Quick and dirty version. I made a version that checks if a manpage exists (but it's not a oneliner). You must have ps2pdf and of course Ghostscript installed in your box. Enhancements appreciated :-)

Delete a file/directory walking subdirectories (bash4 or zsh)

Remove color codes (special characters) with sed


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: