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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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Compress a file or directory keeping the owner and permissions

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

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

add static arp entry to default gateway, arp poison protection

See non printable caracters like tabulations, CRLF, LF line terminators ( colored )
For fancier and cleaner output, try the following snippet : $ showendlines(){ while read i; do od --address-radix=n --width=$(wc -c

Grab an interface's IP from ifconfig without screen clutter
Sometimes, you don't really care about all the other information that ifconfig spits at you (however useful it may otherwise be). You just want an IP. This strips out all the crap and gives you exactly what you want.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

quickly backup or copy a file with bash
less symbols, tab completion. including # export SIMPLE_BACKUP_SUFFIX="_`date +%F`" in your .bashrc provides you to easily timestamp your files

Paste OS X clipboard contents to a file on a remote machine
Redirects the contents of your clipboard through a pipe, to a remote machine via SSH.

prevent accidents and test your command with echo
if you're using wildcards * or ? in your command, and if you're deleting, moving multiple files, it's always safe to see how those wildcards will expand. if you put "echo" in front of your command, the expanded form of your command will be printed. It's better safe than sorry.


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