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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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HOME USE ONLY: Get rid of annoying Polkit password prompts
Although the need to type a password to make certain changes to the system may make perfect sense in a business or educational environment, it makes absolutely zero sense to the home user. So, if you’re at home and would rather get work done than be annoyed by what is essentially Linux’s UAC, then this command is for you.

Test your total disk IO capacity, regardless of caching, to find out how fast the TRUE speed of your disks are
Depending on the speed of you system, amount of RAM, and amount of free disk space, you can find out practically how fast your disks really are. When it completes, take the number of MB copied, and divide by the line showing the "real" number of seconds. In the sample output, the cached value shows a write speed of 178MB/s, which is unrealistic, while the calculated value using the output and the number of seconds shows it to be more like 35MB/s, which is feasible.

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully

Run bash on top of a vi session (saved or not saved), run multiple commands, instead of one at a time with :!(bashcommand), type exit and [enter] to get back to where you left off in vi.

Change proccess affinity.
Set the affinity of a process to a particular core(s). Arguments for processor include a comma separated list, or a range. (example: 1,2 or 0-3) You can use top in smp mode (Press 1) to see the changes to the affinity.

Command line calculator

Show complete URL in netstat output
The -W switch of netstat makes it print complete URL of the connections, which otherwise by default is truncated to fit its default column size. Now to compensate for irregular column sizes, pipe the output to column (-t switch of column prints in tabular form). The only downside to this part is that the very first row, the header, goes pear shape.

Simplified video file renaming
I used this when I had a directory of movies from a camera. I wanted to watch a little of each movie, then rename it depending on what was in the movie. This did the trick for me.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using QPDF
Remove security restrictions from PDF documents using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need QPDF installed (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/) for this to work.


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