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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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list files recursively by size

Show a config file without comments

In (any) vi, add a keystroke to format the current paragraph.
That goes into your $HOME/.exrc file. " Nice macro to reformat lines: map ^A !}fmt Note that the ^A has to be input by typing ^V^A.

Remove several files with ease
Rather than typing out all 10 files, you can use brace expansion to do the trick for you. This is useful for backup files, numbered files, or any files with a repeating pattern. Gives more control than 'rm file*' as I might want to keep others around.

ASCII webcam live stream video using mplayer
Mplayer starts a webcam capture using ASCII art. Only mplayer required

Watch the progress of 'dd'
The 'dd' command doesn't provide a progress when writing data. So, sending the "USR1" signal to the process will spit out its progress as it writes data. This command is superior to others on the site, as it doesn't require you to previously know the PID of the dd command.

Add thousand separator with sed, in a file or within pipe
Does not necessarily require a file to process, it can be used in a pipe as well: $ cat filename | sed -e :a -e 's/\(.*[0-9]\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)/\1,\2/;ta' I don't remember where I copy/pasted this from, I wish I credited the original author

make computer speaking to you :)
you can listen to your computer, but don't be carried away

Using bash inline
There are two ways to use "here documents" with bash to fill stdin: The following example shows use with the "bc" command. a) Using a delimiter at the end of data: $ less-than less-than eeooff bc > k=1024 > m=k*k > g=k*m > g > eeooff 1073741824 b) using the "inline" verion with three less-than symbols: $ less-than less-than less-than "k=1024; m=k*k; g=k*m; g" bc 1073741824 One nice advantage of using the triple less-than version is that the command can easily be recalled from command line history and re-executed. PS: in this "description", I had to use the name "less-than" to represent the less-than symbol because the commandlinefu input text box seems to eat up the real less-than symbols. Odd.

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.


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