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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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Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Find files changed between dates defined by ctime of two files specified by name
This command finds all the files whose status has changed between the ctime of the older and newer . Very useful if you can see from an ls listing a block of consecutive files you want to move or delete, but can't figure out exactly the time range by date.

Identify long lines in a file
This command displays a list of lines that are longer than 72 characters. I use this command to identify those lines in my scripts and cut them short the way I like it.

Copy/move a bunch of files to dot files and back

Get technical and tag information about a video or audio file
MediaInfo supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file. (sudo apt install mediainfo)

switch case of a text file

Block the 6700 worst spamhosts
The above url contains over 6700 of the common ad websites. The command just pastes these into your /etc/hosts.

execute your commands and avoid history records
$ secret_command;export HISTCONTROL= This will make "secret_command" not appear in "history" list.

Search for a string inside all files in the current directory
This is how I typically grep. -R recurse into subdirectories, -n show line numbers of matches, -i ignore case, -s suppress "doesn't exist" and "can't read" messages, -I ignore binary files (technically, process them as having no matches, important for showing inverted results with -v) I have grep aliased to "grep --color=auto" as well, but that's a matter of formatting not function.

Move all images in a directory into a directory hierarchy based on year, month and day based on exif information
This command would move the file "dir/image.jpg" with a "DateTimeOriginal" of "2005:10:12 16:05:56" to "2005/10/12/image.jpg". This is a literal example from the exiftool man page, very useful for classifying photo's. The possibilities are endless.


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