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

create new branch from stashed changes
from http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Stashing Useful for when stash cannot be applied to current branch

Use file(1) to view device information
file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands. See also: $ file -s /dev/dm-* $ file -s /dev/cciss/* etc..

Extract audio from Flash video (*.flv) as mp3 file

Disable sleep mode via cli and systemd (Centos, Debian Ubuntu?)
This causes computer to never power off or go into sleep mode. Disables sleep mode linux.

Clean your broken terminal
If something fracks up your terminal, just type in 'reset' and everything should be good again.

Record microphone input and output to date stamped mp3 file
record audio notes or meetings requires arecord and lame run mp3gain on the resulting file to increase the volume / quality ctrl-c to stop recording

Pick a random line from a file

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

validate xml in a shell script using xmllint


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: