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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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Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

VMware Server print out the state of all registered Virtual Machines.
I use this command on my machines running VMware Server to print out the state of all registered Virtual machines.

Create an animated gif from a Youtube video
requires "youtube-dl" -- sure you can do this with wget and some more obscurity but why waste your time when this great tool is available? the guts consist of mplayer converting a video to a gif -- study this command and read the man page for more information $ mplayer video.flv -ss 00:23 -endpos 6 -vo gif89a:fps=5:output=output.gif -vf scale=400:300 -nosound generates a 6 second gif starting at 23 seconds of play time at 5 fps and a scale of 400x300 start time (-ss)/end time (-endpos) formats: 00:00:00.000 end time should be relative to start time, not absolute. i.e. -endpos 5 == seconds after 0:42 = 0:47 end point play with fps and scale for lower gif sizes the subshell is a solution for the -b flag on youtube-dl which downloads the best quality video, sometimes, which can be various video formats $(ls ${url##*=}*| tail -n1)

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Determine space taken by files of certain type
Just how much space are those zillions of database logs taking up ? How much will you gain on a compression rate of say 80% ? This little line gives you a good start for your calculations.

Salvage a borked terminal
This works in some situations where 'reset' and the other alternatives don't.

let a cow tell you your fortune

Delete all non-printing characters from a file
tr has some predefined sets of characters that are more convenient to use than characters codes

See system users

Get backup from remote host, then expand in current directory using tar


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