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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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Create a new file

Search for a word in less
Although less behaves more or less like vim in certain aspects, the vim regex for word boundaries (\< and \>) do not work in less. Instead, use \b to denote a word boundary. Therefore, if you want to search for, say, the word "exit", but do not want to search for exiting, exits, etc., then surround "exit" with \b. This is useful if you need to search for specific occurrences of a keyword or command. \b can also be used at just the beginning and end, if needed.

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

Synchronise a file from a remote server
You will be prompted for a password unless you have your public keys set-up.

Find broken symlinks and delete them

Search and play youtube videos directly to terminal (no X needed)
Same as other command, however uses youtube-dl internal search (thanks to qoxxxx mentioning this) It does however seem to be a little buggy and youtube-dl crashes sometimes. ## pyt 'Stairway to heaven - Led Zeppelin' pyt 'brain damage - Pink Floyd' No web browser or even X needed. Just a cli and internet connection! mplayer is pauseable and can skip ahead This may break if youtube changes their search html.

Mount a temporary ram partition
For FreeBSD

List files by quoting or escaping special characters.
Tested and works on Linux.

View all date formats, Quick Reference Help Alias
If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command. # creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com $ ssh-keygen -f ~/.ssh/`date +git-$USER@$HOSTNAME-%m-%d-%g` -C 'webmaster@askapache.com' $ # /home/gpl/.ssh/git-gplnet@askapache.github.com-04-22-10 # create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory $ tar -czf $(date +$HOME/.backups/%m-%d-%g-%R-`sed -u 's/\//#/g'

List total available upgrades from apt without upgrading the system
This let's you find out the total packages that have available upgrades. Usefull if you want to check or show the total available upgrades on your system.


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