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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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Tail a log file with long lines truncated
This truncates any lines longer than 80 characters. Also useful for looking at different parts of the line, e.g. cut -b 50-100 shows columns 50 through 100.

continuously check size of files or directories
very handy if you copy or download a/some file(s) and want to know how big it is at the moment

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

Search some text from all files inside a directory

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

print crontab entries for all the users that actually have a crontab
This is how I list the crontab for all the users on a given system that actually have a crontab. You could wrap it with a function block and place it in your .profile or .bashrc for quick access. There's prolly a simpler way to do this. Discuss.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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