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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.

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Make directories for and mount all iso files in a folder

Quick access to ASCII code of a key

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

recursive reset file/dir perms
Good for fixing web permissions. You might also want to do something like this and skip files or directories that begin with a period: $ find public_html/stuff -not -name ".*" \( -type d -exec chmod 755 {} + -o -type f -exec chmod 644 {} + \) ...or include a special case for scripts: $ find public_html/stuff -type d -exec chmod 755 {} + -or -type f -name "*.pl" -exec chmod 755 {} + -or -exec chmod 644 {} +

Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one
As an alternative to using an additional grep -v grep you can use a simple regular expression in the search pattern (first letter is something out of the single letter list ;-)) to drop the grep command itself.

Recursive grep of all c++ source under the current directory

List all global top level modles, then remove ALL npm packages with xargs

Insert a comment on command line for reminder
Comments can be used directly on the command line so I can save in the history a brief description of what command does.

AWK Calculator

Find broken symlinks and delete them
This command is adapted from http://otomaton.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/find-broken-symbolic-links/ Solutions with $ find -L don't work when the link is a loop, an error message is printed.


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