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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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Go to the previous sibling directory in alphabetical order
Based on linkinpark342 suggestion. Sometimes you have to browse your way through a lot of sub-directories. This command cd to the previous sub-directory in alphabetical order. For example, if you have the directories "lectures/01-intro", "lectures/02-basic", "lectures/03-advanced" and so on, and your PWD is "02-basic", it jumps to "01-intro".

Want to known what time is it in another part of the world ?
available timezone can be found in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Other examples: $ TZ=Europe/Paris date; TZ=Australia/Sydney date; TZ=America/New_York date this is based on zoneinfo files on macosx. Your mileage my vary on other unix dialects

Generate pretty secure random passwords
These are my favourite switches on pwgen: -B Don't include ambiguous characters in the password -n Include at least one number in the password -y Include at least one special symbol in the password -c Include at least one capital letter in the password It just works! Add a number to set password length, add another to set how many password to output. Example: pwgen -Bnyc 12 20 this will output 20 password of 12 chars length.

Find the package that installed a command

Transfer large files/directories with no overhead over the network
This invokes tar on the remote machine and pipes the resulting tarfile over the network using ssh and is saved on the local machine. This is useful for making a one-off backup of a directory tree with zero storage overhead on the source. Variations on this include using compression on the source by using 'tar cfvp' or compression at the destination via $ ssh user@host "cd dir; tar cfp - *" | gzip - > file.tar.gz

Merge various PDF files

Recursively create a TAGS file for an entire source tree. TAGS files are useful for editors like Vim and Emacs

Print a row of 50 hyphens
Get there by going backwards and forgetting the numbers.

Find all files larger than 500M and less than 1GB

Match a URL
For the record: I didn't build this. Just shared what I found that worked. Apologies to the original author! I decided I should fix the case where http://example.com is not matched for the next time I need this. So I read rfc1035 and formalized the host name regex. If anyone finds any more holes, please comment.


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