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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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ThePirateBay.org torrent search
usage: tpb searchterm example: tpb the matrix trilogy This searches for torrents from thepiratebay and displays the top results in reverse order, so the 1st result is at the bottom instead of the top -- which is better for command line users

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available

How to get an absolute value
Whenever we are only interested in difference between two numbers and not the positive/negative values we can use this in script.

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"

Puts every word from a file into a new line
Basically it creates a typical word list file from any normal text.

Show the command line for a PID, converting nulls to spaces and a newline
If you cat the file, all the parts of the command line are bunched up. If you use tr to convert the nulls to spaces, you're still left without a newline unless you add another step. This command does everything for you.

Ctrl+S Ctrl+Q terminal output lock and unlock
These are simple shortcuts to pause and continue terminal output, works in most terminals and screen multiplexers like screen. You can use it to catch something if things change too fast, and scroll with Shift + PgUp PgDown. On linux console ScrollLock can also be used.

df without line wrap on long FS name
-P uses the POSIX output format, which makes information on each file system always printed on exactly one line. "column -t" makes a table from the input.

test for ksh/bash
Dave Korn gave me this one. It works because ksh allows variable names ( w/o the $name syntax ) used by sh and bash. I wrote it to permit "single source" shell libraries; the current objective: every shell library may be sourced by either shell. see http://github.com/applemcg/backash

backup with mysqldump a really big mysql database to a remote machine over ssh
backup big mysql db to remote machine over ssh. "--skip-opt" option is needed when you can?t allocate full database in ram.


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