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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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Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

Remove executable bit from all files in the current directory recursively, excluding other directories
With GNU chmod at least it is that simple.

See system users

Count occurrences per minute in a log file
The cut should match the relevant timestamp part of the logfile, the uniq will count the number of occurrences during this time interval.

Extract busiest times from apache access log
Analyze an Apache access log for the time period with most activity and display the hit count, requesting IP and the timestamp. May help detect a brute force dos attack.

Make ls output better visible on dark terminals in bash
Sometimes you have a situation where you cannot properly see the ls output when you are using a terminal w/a dark background. Usually bash has ls aliased to use colors, and you can easily get ls to use the default foreground color via simply unaliasing the command.

Make less act like cat if its input's contents can fit on one screen

View non-printing characters with cat
Useful to detect number of tabs in an empty line, DOS newline (carriage return + newline). A tool that can help you understand why your parsing is not working.

Find all active ip's in a subnet
nmap for windows and other platforms is available on developer's site: http://nmap.org/download.html nmap is robust tool with many options and has various output modes - is the best (imho) tool out there.. from nmap 5.21 man page: -oN/-oX/-oS/-oG : Output scan in normal, XML, s|

Show biggest files/directories, biggest first with 'k,m,g' eyecandy
I use this on debian testing, works like the other sorted du variants, but i like small numbers and suffixes :)


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