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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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Create an alias, store it in ~/.bash_aliases and source your new alias into the ~/.bashrc
This is useful if you use a shell with a lot of other users. You will be able to run "topu" to see your running processes instead of the complete 'top -u username'. Read more on alias: http://man.cx/alias

a fast way to repeat output a byte
I'm both a one-liner fan and a haskell learner

Check if x86 Solaris based system is 32bit or 64bit
This is likely only valid on Solaris based systems. Unfortunately a lot of the more universal techniques for determining if a system is 32bit or 64bit on x86 solaris fail to give much more information than "i86pc"

download the contents of a remote folder in the current local folder

kill all running instances of wine and programs runned by it (exe)
Look mah! All pipes

disable caps lock
a quick one-line way to disable caps lock while running X.

Screenshot Directly To Clipboard
This will take a screenshot of a selected area and save it as foo.png as well as sending it straight to the clipboard for pasting into GIMP, Anki, Zim, etc.

Mount a partition from dd disk image
Assuming we have a disk image, ie. created by $dd if=/dev/sda of=image.dd we can check the image's partition layout with $fdisk -ul image.dd then, we substitute "x" with starting sector of the partition we want to mount. This example assumes that the disk uses 512 B sectors

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

Function to split a string into an array


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