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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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Copy without overwriting

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Install the Debian-packaged version of a Perl module
Running 'cpan Module::Name' will install that module from CPAN. This is a simple way of using a similar command to install a packaged Perl module from a Debian archive using apt-get.

Kill all Zombie processes (Guaranteed!)
It identifies the parents of the Zombie processes and kill them. So the new parent of orphan Zombies will be the Init process and he is already waiting for reaping them. Be careful! It may also kill your useful processes just because they are not taking care and waiting for their children (bad parents!).

Stop and continue processing on a terminal
This will send the ASCII sequence for DC3 to the currently running tty which results in SIGSTOP (19). You can continue with ASCII sequence for DC1 by pressing CTRL+q which results in SIGCONT (18).

Delete C style comments using vim

Run any GUI program remotely
$ ssh -X example.org xeyes The SSH server configuration requires: X11Forwarding yes # this is default in Debian And it's convenient too: Compression delayed

Transfer a file to multiple hosts over ssh
You can push files to up to 32 servers at once assuming ssh keys are in place. Great tool, it is part of the pssh suite.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

grep -v with multiple patterns.
Use multiple patterns with grep -v. So you can print all lines in a file except those containing the multiple patterns you specify.


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