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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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Generate Random Text based on Length
Random text of length "$1" without the useless cat command.

Colorful man
Colourful with vim regex finding goodness! Replace the 'man' with the page to be looked up. I actually have as a function in my .profile function vman { /usr/bin/man $* | /usr/bin/col -b | /usr/bin/iconv -c | view -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist nospell nonu' -

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Delete all files older than X in given path
This will find all files under the path "." which are older than 10 days, and delete them. If you wish to use the "rm" command instead, replace "-delete" with "-exec rm [options] {} \;"

delete all leading and trailing whitespace from each line in file

processes per user counter
enumerates the number of processes for each user. ps BSD format is used here , for standard Unix format use : ps -eLf |awk '{$1} {++P[$1]} END {for(a in P) if (a !="UID") print a,P[a]}'

Calculate pi with specific scale
a() function in bc is for arctangent, available if using -l option included.

How to backup hard disk timely?
Creates files in $DATE and hardlinks existing files to $PREVDATE. Thus full backup in each directory. Only drawback is changed modification time. Recommend a wrapper script to determine $DATE and $PREVDATE. Works like a charm. (Dirvish handrolled)

convert unixtime to human-readable

add a gpg key to aptitute package manager in a ubuntu system
when we add a new package to a aptitude (the debian package manager) we need to add the gpg, otherwise it will show warning / error for missing key


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