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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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Hex math with bc
To do hex to binary: echo 'ibase=16; obase=2; 16*16' | bc # prints: 111100100 To do 16*16 from decimal to hex: echo 'ibase=10; obase=16; 16*16' | bc # prints: 100 You get the idea... Alternatively, run bc in interactive mode (see man page)

Binary clock
cryptic version

Job Control
You're running a script, command, whatever.. You don't expect it to take long, now 5pm has rolled around and you're ready to go home... Wait, it's still running... You forgot to nohup it before running it... Suspend it, send it to the background, then disown it... The ouput wont go anywhere, but at least the command will still run...

Enable automatic typo correction for directory names

draw matrix using dot

Colorized grep in less
Get your colorized grep output in less(1). This involves two things: forcing grep to output colors even though it's not going to a terminal and telling less to handle those properly.

List commands with a short summary
Obviously, you can replace 'man' command with any command in this command line to do useful things. I just want to mention that there is a way to list all the commands which you can execute directly without giving fullpath. Normally all important commands will be placed in your PATH directories. This commandline uses that variable to get commands. Works in Ubuntu, will work in all 'manpage' configured *nix systems.

Explanation of system and MySQL error codes
perror should be installed if mysql-server package is installed

move up through directories faster (set in your /etc/profile or .bash_profile)
You can also remove the "&& pwd" if you don't want it to print out each directory as it moves up.

split and combine different pages from different pdf's
The command shows the real power of the pdftk tool, you can do basically everything you want with multiple pdf's. In the command a book is created from chapters, headings and covers.


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