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

Add "prefix" on a buch of files

automatically ditch old versions in a conflict
This is not exactly a commandline, but a vim macro to automatically ditch the "old" version of a conflict when dealing with the naster

For Gentoo users : helping with USE / emerge
This command puts all the flags of the USE variable actually used by the packages you emerged to the file "use", and those which are unused but available to the file "notuse"

Get the time since epoch
Get the time since epoch. Useful when working with commands and logs which use this format.

Recursively remove .svn directories

Generate random password
Generates password consisting of alphanumeric characters, defaults to 16 characters unless argument given.

Convert multiple pdf's to jpg in linux using the convert command

An alias to re-run last command with sudo. Similar to "sudo !!"
I didn't come up with this myself, but I always add this to my .bash_aliases file. It's essentially the same idea as running "sudo !!" except it's much easier to type. (You can't just alias "sudo !!", it doesn't really work for reasons I don't understand.) "fc" is a shell built-in for editing and re-running previous commands. The -l flag tells it to display the line rather than edit it, and the -n command tells it to omit the line number. -1 tells it to print the previous line. For more detail: $help fc

Image to color palette generator
Extract a color palette from a image useful for designers. Example usage: $extract-palette myawesomeimage.jpg 4 Where the first argument is the image you want to extract a palette from. The second argument is the number of colors you want. It may be the case where you want to change the search space. In that case, change the -resize argument to a bigger or smaller result. See the ImageMagick documentation for the -resize argument.

aptitude easter eggs
this is a reference to Antoine de St. Exupery's "The Little Prince"


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: