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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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Do one ping to a URL, I use this in a MRTG gauge graph to monitor connectivity

Default value or argument
I used it for this function, which prints hashes: function liner { num_lines=${1:-42} echo printf %${num_lines}s|tr " " "#" echo } Note the colon-dash, instead of the usual colon-equals.

Switch to the previous branch used in git(1)
Very useful if you keep switching between the same two branches all the time.

list files recursively by size

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

One liner to parse all epubs in a directory and use the calibre ebook-convert utility to convert them to mobi format
all ebook-convert -options are optional. all you really need to pass ebook-convert is the incoming and outgoing names, with extensions. Has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10

Show all the available information about your current distribution, package management and base
Just run this command and it will printout all the info available about your current distribution and package management system.

List programs with open ports and connections

grab all of google IPv4 network blocks

Watch the disk fill up with change highlighting
If you add the -d flag each difference in the command's output will be highlighted. I also monitor individual drives by adding them to df. Makes for a nice thin status line that I can shove to the bottom of the monitor.


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