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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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Run a command if file/directory changes
Example: $ runonchange /etc/nginx nginx -t Ignores vim temp files. Depends on 'inotify-tools' for monitoring of file changes. Alternative to tools like 'entr', 'watchr'.

Bind a key with a command
the -x option is for binding to a shell command

Select rectangular screen area
Hold 'Ctrl' + 'Alt' key while selecting rectangular text area of the screen with left mouse button. Should work in any terminal screen (xterm, konsole, ...) under X, if not then try with 'Ctrl' + 'Shift' + 'Alt' or two-combination of these.

list files recursively by size

Convert deb to rpm
converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats ... It also supports LSB packages.

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

Delete Empty Directories
Deletes empty directories and prints an error if directory is not empty.

Sum columns from CSV column $COL
More of the same but with more elaborate perl-fu :-)

Store dirs to later be changed to independant of the last directory you were in. Also with managment tools.
Check out: help dirs help pushd help popd -- Cheers!

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
Sends SIGINFO to the process. This is a BSD feature OS X inherited. You must have the terminal window executing dd selected when entering CTRL + T for this to work.


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