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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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Better recursive grep with pretty colors... requires ruby and gems (run: "gem install rak")

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Find how much of your life you've wasted coding in the current directory
Finds all C++, Python, SWIG files in your present directory (uses "*" rather than "." to exclude invisibles) and counts how many lines are in them. Returns only the last line (the total).

Remount root in read-write mode.
Saved my day, when my harddrive got stuck in read-only mode.

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

Have your sound card call out elapsed time.
Useful contexts : You are doing yoga or some other physical training in which you are holding a position. Or you practice the pomodoro productivity technique. Or your girlfriend said "We're leaving in 40 minutes". Design details: sleep executes before espeak to give you a 5 seconds head start. espeak is run in the background so it doesn't mess up the timing.

dd with progress bar and statistics to gzipped image

Create a bunch of dummy files for testing
Sometimes I need to create a directory of files to operate on to test out some commandlinefu I am cooking up. The main thing is the range ({1..N}) expansion.

from within vi, pipe a chunk of lines to a command line and replace the chunk with the result
The vi key sequence !}command will send the file contents from the cursor to the next blank line as STDOUT to the command specified and replace that sequence of file lines with the output of the command. For example: sorting a block of data - !}sort The sequence !{command will do the same but "upwards" (from the current position towards the start of the file.

Perl One Liner to Generate a Random IP Address


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