Commands by CodSpirit (9)

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

Currency Conversion
This works in Mac OS X (10.6.2) (natively comes with curl) usage: currency_convert $1(amount) $2(from_denomination) $3(to_denomination)

cat a file backwards
Or "tail -r" on Solaris.

Limit the cpu usage of a process
Similar to `cpulimit`, although `prlimit` can be found shipped with recent util-linux. Example: limit CPU consumption to 10% for a math problem which ordinarily takes up 100% CPU: Before: $ bc -l

unbuffered python output
You have a python script that slowly prints output, you want to pipe the output to grep or tee, and you are impatient and want to watch the results right away. Rather than modify your script (making it slightly less efficient), use the -u option to have the output unbuffered.

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" }

Show word-by-word differences between two latex files, in color

make sure you don't add large file to your repository

check python syntax in vim

simple port check command

Find name of package which installed a given shell command
Some command names are very different from the name of the package that installed them. Sometimes, you may want to find out the name of the package that provided a command on a system, so that you can install it on another system.

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: