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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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Monitor a file's size

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

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

Pass TAB as field separator to sort, join, cut, etc.
Use this BASH trick to create a variable containing the TAB character and pass it as the argument to sort, join, cut and other commands which don't understand the \t notation. $ sort -t $'\t' ... $ join -t $'\t' ... $ cut -d $'\t' ...

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

How to backup hard disk timely?
Creates files in $DATE and hardlinks existing files to $PREVDATE. Thus full backup in each directory. Only drawback is changed modification time. Recommend a wrapper script to determine $DATE and $PREVDATE. Works like a charm. (Dirvish handrolled)

ls -hog --> a more compact ls -l
I often deal with long file names and the 'ls -l' command leaves very little room for file names. An alternative is to use the -h -o and -g flags (or together, -hog). * The -h flag produces human-readable file size (e.g. 91K instead of 92728) * The -o suppresses the owner column * The -g suppresses the group column Since I use to alias ll='ls -l', I now do alias ll='ls -hog'

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Make sure your script runs with a minimum Bash version
If you use new features of a certain Bash version in your shell script, make sure that it actually runs with the required version.


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