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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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Backup a remote database to your local filesystem
I have this on a daily cronjob to backup the commandlinefu.com database from NearlyFreeSpeech.net (awesome hosts by the way) to my local drive. Note that (on my Ubuntu system at least) you need to escape the % signs on the crontab.

Split and join with split and cat.
`split -b 1k file` splits files into 1k chunks. Rejoin them with `cat x* > file`.

Copy file content to X clipboard
(only when vim has been compiled with +clipboard)

Search commandlinefu.com from the command line using the API
Search for one/many words on commandlinefu, results in vim for easy copy, manipulation. The -R flag is for readonly mode...you can still write to a file, but vim won't prompt for save on quit. What I'd really like is a way to do this from within vim in a new tab. Something like $ :Tex path/to/file but $ :cmdfu search terms

Monitor memory fine-grained usage (e.g. firefox)
Sometimes top/htop don't give the fine-grained detail on memory usage you might need. Sum up the exact memory types you want

Pause Current Thread
Hold ctrl and press z to pause the current thread. Run $fg to resume it.

Amazing real time picture of the sun in your wallpaper
Changes the wallpaper for the last IR picture of the sun taken by SOHO satellite. Lesser size, try $ curl http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/eit_195/512/latest.jpg | xli -onroot -fullscreen -xzoom 120 -yzoom 120 -border black stdin I use inside kalarm(kde), updating every 15 minutes needs xli , curl

unbuffered tcpdump
Sometimes the question comes up: How to get unbuffered tcpdump output into the next program in the pipe? i.e. if your OS forces you to wait for the buffer to fill before the next program sees any of the output If you use -Uw- then you can't use -A (or -X or -XX) at the same time. When the question comes up, I've never seen anyone suggest this simple solution: chaining 2 tcpdump instances.

Convert multiple flac files to mp3
make sure that flac and lame are installed sudo apt-get install lame flac


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