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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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Hiding and Show files on Mac OS X
These commands will mark a file as hidden or visible to Mac OS X Finder. Notice the capitol V vs the lowercase v. This will also work for directories. setfile -a V foo.bar; // This marks the file invisible setfile -a v foo.bar; // This marks the file visible I have also found that adding the following aliases are helpful: alias hide='setfile -a V' alias show='setfile -a v'

When was your OS installed?

Burn CD/DVD from an iso, eject disc when finished.
cdrecord -scanbus will tell you the (x,y,z) value of your cdr (for example, mine is 3,0,0)

Change prompt to MS-DOS one (joke)

Search for a process by name
ps and grep is a dangerous combination -- grep tries to match everything on each line (thus the all too common: grep -v grep hack). ps -C doesn't use grep, it uses the process table for an exact match. Thus, you'll get an accurate list with: ps -fC sh rather finding every process with sh somewhere on the line.

Follow tail by name (fix for rolling logs with tail -f)
If you use 'tail -f foo.txt' and it becomes temporarily moved/deleted (ie: log rolls over) then tail will not pick up on the new foo.txt and simply waits with no output. 'tail -F' allows you to follow the file by it's name, rather than a descriptor. If foo.txt disappears, tail will wait until the filename appears again and then continues tailing.

Apply new patch for a directory (originDir)

Convert (almost) any video file into webm format for online html5 streaming

diff directories, quick cut and paste to view the changes
We use this to quickly highlight differences and provide a quick way to cut and paste the command to view the files using the marvellous vimdiff


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