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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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Find the package that installed a command

Takes all file except file between !()
Go to tmp : cd /tmp; mkdir retmp; cd retmp Create 10 files : for i in {1..10}; do touch test$i; done Remove all files except test10 : rm !(test10)

Create POSIX tar archive
tar(1) and cpio(1) are not fully platform agnostic, although their file formats are specified in POSIX.1-2001. As such, GNU tar(1) might not be able to extract a BSD tar(1) archive, and ivce versa. pax(1) is defined in POSIX.1-2001. To extract an archive: $ pax -rf archive.tar

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"

Show a Package Version on Debian based distribution
if you don't want to show string "version?, then use awk or cut filter it: apt-cache show pkgname | grep -i "version:" | awk '{ print $2 }' we can also use regex to search many packages and show their versions: apt-cache search pkgregex | grep -i "version:"

convert ascii string to hex
Even adds a newline.

Get your external IP address if your machine has a DNS entry
Easy way to see your real external IP

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Recall “N”th command from your BASH history without executing it.

Display the definition of a shell function
Display the code of a previously defined shell function.


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Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
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Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

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