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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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When was your OS installed?
Show time and date when you installed your OS.

Check if a domain is available and get the answer in just one line
Returns nothing if the domain exists and 'No match for domain.com' otherwise.

Turn shell tracing and verbosity (set -xv) on/off with 1 command!
Running this command turns shell tracing and shell verbose debugging on or off. Not only does it do that, it also uses your terminals builtin method of setting colors to make debugging much easier. It looks at the current shell options contained in the $- special bash variable and that lets this function set the opposite of the current value. So from the shell you could do a: $ setx; echo "y" | ( cat -t ) | echo "d"; setx and it will turn on debbuggin. This is an amazingly useful function that is perfect to add system-wide by adding it to /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.. You can run it from the shell, and you can also use it in your shell scripts like my .bash_profile - http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Instant mirror from your laptop + webcam (fullscreen+grab)
This directly puts the "mirror" into fullscreen, and lets you take photos by pressing the 's' key. I bet appearance conscious people will have keyboard shortcut for this command by now.

Route outbound SMTP connections through a addtional IP address rather than your primary

Blue Matrix
Same as original, but works in bash

HourGlass
Displays an animated hourglass for x amount of seconds

Ping all hosts on 192.168.1.0/24
Pings all the hosts on 192.168.1.0/24 in parallel, so it is very fast. Alive host IP addresses are echoed to stdout as pings are responded to.

Plaintext credentials sniffing with tcpdump and grep
Simple TCPDUMP grepping for common unsafe protocols (HTTP, POP3, SMTP, FTP)

Google URL shortener
Shorter and made into a function.


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