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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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Exclude .svn, .git and other VCS junk for a pristine tarball
~$ tar --version tar (GNU tar) 1.20

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

Create incremental snapshots of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Creates an incremental snapshot of individual folders.

list files recursively by size

Merge files, joining each line in one line
Merge files, joining line by line horizontally. Very useful when you have a lot of files where each line represents an info about an event and you want to join them into a single file where each line has all the info about the same event See the example for a better understanding

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"

Show sorted list of files with sizes more than 1MB in the current dir

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

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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