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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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Create a Multi-Part Archive Without Proprietary Junkware
Leave it to a proprietary software vendor to turn a cheap and easy parlor trick into a selling point. "Hey guys, why don't we turn our _collection of multiple files_ into a *collection of multiple files*!!" Extract the ^above with this: $ cat pics.tar.gz.??? | tar xzv ^extract on any Unix - no need to install junkware! (If you must make proprietary software, at least make it do something *new*) if [ -e windows ]; then use 7-Zip

Bulk install
Like 7172, but much easier.

Clear current session history (bash)

list files recursively by size

Generate a random password 30 characters long

Take screenshot through SSH
When connected to a box via ssh you can do a quick screenshot of that box using this command. After that you can rscp it over to your box and look at it.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Calculate pi to an arbitrary number of decimal places
Change the scale to adjust number of decimal places prefix the command with "time" to benchmark the computer (compare how long it takes to calculate 10000 digits of pi on various computers).

See why a program can't seem to access a file
Sometimes a program refuses to read a file and you're not sure why. You may have display_errors turned off for PHP or something. In this example, fopen('/var/www/test/foo.txt') was called but doesn't have read access to foo.txt. Strace can tell you what went wrong. E.g., if php doesn't have read access to the file, strace will say "EACCESS (Permission denied)". Or, if the file path you gave doesn't exist, strace will say "ENOENT (No such file or directory)", etc. This works for any program you can run from the command-line, e.g., strace python myapp.py -e open,access... Note: the above command uses php-cli, not mod_php, which is a different SAPI with diff configs, etc.


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