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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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easily find megabyte eating files or directories

Create a 100MB file for testing transfer speed

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

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"

Paste hardware list (hwls) in html format into pastehtml.com directly from console and return URI.
In this Linux box i need to become root to get the complete hardware list, so either become root before or call it with sudo as i did, your choice.

Quickly add user accounts to the system and force a password change on first login
This command is a bit Linux specific, as --stdin doesn't exist for passwd on many Unix machines. Further, useradd is high level in most distributions and Unix derivatives except for the Debian family of distros, where adduser would be more appropriate. The last bit, with chage, will force the user to change their password on new login.

Change user within ssh session retaining the current MIT cookie for X-forwarding
When you remotely log in like "ssh -X userA:host" and become a different user with "su UserB", X-forwarding will not work anymore since /home/UserB/.Xauthority does not exist. This will use UserA's information stored in .Xauthority for UserB to enable X-forwarding. Watch http://prefetch.net/blog/index.php/2008/04/05/respect-my-xauthority/ for details.

A line across the entire width of the terminal
Use tput cols to find the width of the terminal and set it as the minimum field width.

Creates Solaris alternate boot environment on another zpool.
PS: 'lustatus' gives the list of all alternate boot environments.

easily strace all your apache processes
This one-liner will use strace to attach to all of the currently running apache processes output and piped from the initial "ps auxw" command into some awk.


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