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

list files recursively by size

Binary clock
Like 7171, but fixed typo, uses fewer variables, and even more cryptic!

Temporarily suspend and unsuspend a foreground job
Press ^Z, do what you need to do on the shell, then input % to resurrect the suspended job.

find all writable (by user) files in a directory tree (use 4 for readable, 1 for executable)

VIM: Go back to the last place you were in a document
You're perhaps editing a line, or reading a certain line of code, you use page up and down or move through the file and now you wish to return to the last position the cursor was at. '' will get you there.

yes > /dev/null
your laptop can be a good heater :)

Generate a binary file with all ones (0xff) in it
This is similar to how you would generate a file with all zeros $ dd if=/dev/zero of=allzeros bs=1024 count=2k

Watch a dig in progress
Watch a dig in progress

Speak & Spell-esque glitch sounds
The Speak & Spell's sound chip uses a compressed audio format called "linear predictive coding". This command will read random bytes and attempt to decompress them as if it were audio data compressed in this format, then play it. This results in a unique sound which is similar to a glitching Speak & Spell.

Network Folder Copy with Monitoring ( tar + nc + pv )
Transfer tar stream thru nc with pv montoiring taken from: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/


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: