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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 files recursively by size

Generate a ZenCart-style MD5 password hash.
ZenCart uses a MD5 with a salt to secure its passwords. If you need to forcibly change someone's password to a known value within the database, this one-liner can generate the password. Change the value of 'p' to the password you want.

Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code
I have a bash alias for this command line and find it useful for searching C code for error messages. The -H tells grep to print the filename. you can omit the -i to match the case exactly or keep the -i for case-insensitive matching. This find command find all .c and .h files

Restore a local drive from the image on remote host via ssh

Find the package that installed a command

Expand shortened URLs
curl(1) is more portable than wget(1) across Unices, so here is an alternative doing the same thing with greater portability. This shell function uses curl(1) to show what site a shortened URL is pointing to, even if there are many nested shortened URLs. This is a great way to test whether or not the shortened URL is sending you to a malicious site, or somewhere nasty that you don't want to visit. The sample output is from: $ expandurl http://t.co/LDWqmtDM

Jump to line X in file in Nano.
Starts the cursor on line X of file foo. Useful for longer files in which it takes a long time to scroll. If X is greater than the number of lines in file foo, it will go to the last existing line.

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.

list block level layout

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully
Executes the previously-run command constantly until it returns 0 (success). Put a


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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.

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