Commands by mcover (1)

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

Fetch every font from dafont.com to current folder
Requires aria2c but could just as easily wget or anything else. A great way to build up a nice font collection for Gimp without having to waste a lot of time. :-)

Get full from half remembered commands
Show all commands having the part known by you. Eg: $apropos pdf | less

Dump dvd from a different machine onto this one.
You can use this to directly dump from machine A (with dvd drive) to machine B (without dvd drive) . I used this to copy dvd using my friend's machine to my netbook. Above command is to be issued on machine B. Advantages : 1) No wasting time dumping first to machine A and then copying to Machine B. 2) You dont need to use space on Machine A. In fact, this will work even when Machine A doesnt have enough hdd space to dump the DVD. Use -C ssh option on slow networks (enables compression). you can replace "dd if=/dev/dvd" with any ripping command as long as it spews the iso to stdout.

rot13 simple substitution cipher via command line
E.g. Useful for hiding spoilers in reviews, etc.

Exclude multiple columns using AWK
Print all columns except the 1st and 3rd.

list files recursively by size

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Fast file backup
This is a BASH feature. The above command will create a backup of "filename" called "filename.DATE", where DATE is the actual day in %Y%m%d (year, month and day numbers together) format.

display systemd log entries for sshd using "no-pager" (a bit like in pre-systemd: grep sshd /var/log/messages)
In pre-systemd systems, something like: "# grep sshd /var/log/messages" would display log events in /var/log/messages containing "sshd". # journalctl -u sshd --no-pager The above command displays similar results for systemd systems. (Note that this needs to be run with root permissions to access the log data.)

Open Remote Desktop (RDP) from command line having a custom screen size
This example uses xfreerdp, which builds upon the development of rdesktop. This example usage will also send you the remote machine's sound.

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: