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

extracts 64 bytes of random digits from random lines out of /dev/random sent to stdio
Use this the next time you need to come up with a reasonably random bitstring, like for a WPA/WPA2 PSK or something. Takes a continuous stream of bytes coming from /dev/urandom, runs it through od(1), picking a random field ($0 and $1 excluded) from a random line and then prints it.

Reset terminal that has been buggered by binary input or similar

Import SQL into MySQL with a progress meter
This uses PV to monitor the progress of the MySQL import and displays it though Zenity. You could also do this pv ~/database.sql | mysql -u root -pPASSWORD -D database_name and get a display in the CLI that looks like this 2.19MB 0:00:06 [ 160kB/s] [> ] 5% ETA 0:01:40 My Nautalus script using this command is here http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post1253285.html#post1253285

Create a thumbnail from a video file

Multi-segment file downloading with lftp
This is for files only, for directories 'mirror' has to be used.

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.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

find the process that is using a certain port e.g. port 3000

function to compute what percentage of X is Y? Where percent/100 = X/Y => percent=100*X/Y
This function make it easy to compute X/Y as a percentage. The name "wpoxiy" is an acronym of "what percentage of X is Y"


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: