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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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Mplayer save stream to file
To save any streaming url content to a file.

Strace all signals processes based on a name ( The processes already started... ) with bash built-in
Especially for sysadmins when they don't want to waste time to add -p flag on the N processes of a processname. In the old school, you did ; $ pgrep processname and typing strace -f -p 456 -p 678 -p 974... You can add -f argument to the function. That way, the function will deal with pgrep to match the command-line. Example : $ processname -f jrockit

swap the java version being used
You have openjdk and sun java installed. Many of your java plugins will not work properly. Something called IcedTea (the java web plugin) keeps crashing. Run this and select sun java to use sun java.

Print all /etc/passwd lines with duplicated uid
Prints all the lines in /etc/passwd belonging to users with a duplicated uid. It also adds the hostname to the beginning of the line. It's been tested in AIX, Solaris and Linux.

Realtime lines per second in a log file
Displays the realtime line output rate of a logfile. -l tels pv to count lines -i to refresh every 10 seconds -l option is not in old versions of pv. If the remote system has an old pv version: ssh tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | pv -l -i10 -r >/dev/null

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Use a regex as a field separator awk

encode image to base64 and copy to clipboard
I use it for embedding images in CSS for Stylish, the Firefox addon. Thought it might be useful to others.

port forwarding
pem file used by AWS servers for additional security

Pick a random line from a file
This is from perldoc -q random.*line, which says: This has a significant advantage in space over reading the whole file in. You can find a proof of this method in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Section 3.4.2, by Donald E. Knuth. Who am I to argue with Don Knuth?


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