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

Give webpage status code
this function will give you a status webpage code using curl.

GREP a PDF file.
PDF files are simultaneously wonderful and heinous. They are wonderful in being ubiquitous and mostly being cross platform. They are heinous in being very difficult to work with from the command line, search, grep, use only the text inside the PDF, or use outside of proprietary products. xpdf is a wonderful set of PDF tools. It is on many linux distros and can be installed on OS X. While primarily an open PDF viewer for X, xpdf has the tool "pdftotext" that can extract formated or unformatted text from inside a PDF that has text. This text stream can then be further processed by grep or other tool. The '-' after the file name directs output to stdout rather than to a text file the same name as the PDF. Make sure you use version 3.02 of pdftotext or later; earlier versions clipped lines. The lines extracted from a PDF without the "-layout" option are very long. More paragraphs. Use just to test that a pattern exists in the file. With "-layout" the output resembles the lines, but it is not perfect. xpdf is available open source at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

Get the number of days in a given month and year

extracting audio and video from a movie
rips the audio and video stream of a movie. The two streams are stored separately.

Fibonacci numbers with awk
recursive version, "pure" AWK

Find files and calculate size of result in shell
Using find's internal stat to get the file size is about 50 times faster than using -exec stat.

Add forgotten changes to the last git commit
It's pretty common to forgot to commit a files, be it a modification, or a brand new file. If you did forget something, git add the files you want, and then git commit --amend. It will essentially redo the last commit, with the changes you just added. It seeds the commit message with the last commit message by default. You probably shouldn't do this if you've already pushed the commit.

Find the package that installed a command


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