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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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Get your external IP address ( 10 characters long )
Shortest url to a external IP-service, 10 characters.

Print a date from 3 days ago
This command prints the Date (Not time) from 3 days ago (72 hours ago). This works on systems without GNU date (MacOSX , Solaris, FreeBSD).

Watch how many tcp connections there are per state every two seconds.

Copy files to a remote host with SFTP with a leading dot, then rename them to the real file name
Usage: $ sftp-cp * | sftp user@host:/dir This is useful if there is a process on the remote machine waiting for files in an incoming directory. This way it won't see half-transmitted files if it ignores hidden files.

Poor's man Matrix script
This creates a matrix of letters that run forever until you hit Ctrl-C simulating "The Matrix" effect... just for fun :) You may want to try the -n and -y switch to change the "FX" LOL! e.g.: pwgen -ny 3

Find the package that installed a command
Put this one-line function somewhere in your shell init, re-login and try $ whatinstalled This is an elaborate wrapper around "dpkg -S", with numerous safeguards. Symlinks and command aliases are resolved. If the searched command is not an existing executable file or was installed by some other means than dpkg/apt, nothing is printed to stdout, otherwise the package name.

Change SSH RSA passphrase
Protects your secret identity with a passphrase. OSX 10.6 automatically does key forwarding and can store the passphrase in the keychain. For other OSes, use ssh -A or set ForwardAgent in ssh_config to enable forwarding. Then use ssh-agent/ssh-add.

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"

Convert files from DOS line endings to UNIX line endings
The old dos2unix from sysutils has been deprecated on Debian systems to this tool.

separate (emphasize) digital strings from other text


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