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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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Insert a comment on command line for reminder
Comments can be used directly on the command line so I can save in the history a brief description of what command does.

Open-iscsi target discovery

Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

Recursive replace of directory and file names in the current directory.
no grep, no perl, no pipe. even better in zsh/bash4: $ for i in **/*oldname*; do "mv $i ${i/oldname/newname/}"; done No find, no grep, no perl, no pipe

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Check command history, but avoid running it
!whatever will search your command history and execute the first command that matches 'whatever'. If you don't feel safe doing this put :p on the end to print without executing. Recommended when running as superuser.

Show this month's calendar, with today's date highlighted
Explanation: * The date command evaluated to today's date with blank padded on the left if single digit * The grep command search and highlight today's date * The --before-context and --after-context flags displays up to 6 lines before and after the line containing today's date; thus completes the calendar. I have tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard and Xubuntu 8.10

Google Translate
$translate works from command line

Prints a file leaving out all blank lines and comment-only lines
Does not print any line that either: - is empty - contains only spaces or tabs - starts with # - starts with spaces/tabs followed by a #

Summarize the number of open TCP connections by state
Useful for checking the number and state of TCP connections.


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