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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"

Share your terminal session real-time
One person does `mkfifo foo; script -f foo' and another can supervise real-time what is being done using `cat foo'.

find files beginning with filename* that do not include "string"
Inverse grep, to find files without the string

Recompress all text files in a subdirectory with lzma
This will deal nicely with filenames containing newlines and will run one lzma process per CPU core. It requires GNU Parallel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

Increment the filename of png in a given directory by one

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"

Use QEMU to create a hardware dual-boot without rebooting
After downloading an ISO image, assuming you have QEMU installed, it’s possible to boot an ISO image in a virtual machine and then install that ISO from within the virtual machine directly to a physical drive, bypassing the need to reboot. Simply pass the ISO image as the -cdrom parameter, followed by “format=raw,file=/dev/sdb” (replace /dev/sdb with the drive you want to install to) as the hard drive parameter (making absolutely certain to specify the raw format, of course). Once you boot into the ISO image with QEMU, just run the installer as if it were a virtual machine — it’ll just use the physical device as an install target. After that, you’ll be able to seamlessly boot multiple distros (or even other operating systems) at once.

Continually monitor things
You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle.

Sort a character string
Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.

Find the package that installed a command


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
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» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

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Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

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