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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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Remove blank lines from a file using grep and save output to new file
The ^$ within the quotes is a regular expression: ^=beginning of line, $=end of line, with no characters between.

Press Any Key to Continue

Create colorized html file from Vim or Vimdiff
While editing a source file in vim, or using vimdiff to compare two or more files, the ':TOhtml' command can be used to export each buffer as an html file, including syntax highlighting and vimdiff colorization. If you are in insert mode in vim, you will have to type :TOhtml This will open a new buffer filled with html, which you can then save.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Convert encoding from cp1252 (MS Windows) to UTF-8 on source code files

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

follow the content of all files in a directory
The `-q' arg forces tail to not output the name of the current file

Tune your guitar from the command line.
This command, taken from play's manual page, plays a synthesized guitar tone for each of the strings on a standard tuned guitar. The command "play" is a part of the package "sox".

Skip filenames with control characters, a.k.a tab,newline etc

Get a range of SVN revisions from svn diff and tar gz them
Handy when you need to create a list of files to be updated when subversion is not available on the remote host. You can take this tar file, and upload and extract it where you need it. Replace M and N with the revisions specific to yours. Make sure you do this from an updated (svn up) working directory.


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