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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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Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Find all dot files and directories

List by size all of the directories in a given tree.

Update Ogg Vorbis file comments
The "vorbiscomment" utility lets you update information such as artist names and song and album tags in an Ogg Vorbis file. You can use this command to fix any mistakes that were made when ripping an album.

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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