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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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Delicious search with human readable output
You can install filterous with $ sudo apt-get install libxslt1-dev; sudo easy_install -U filterous

Compare a remote file with a local file

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Twitpic upload and Tweet

Rename duplicates from MusicBrainz Picard
Renames duplicates from MusicBrainz Picard, so you get the latest copy and not a bunch of duplicates.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

See system users

Lookup hostname for IP address

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.

Clean your broken terminal
When some console full-screen program (minicom, vi, some installers) breaks down your terminal, try this command to revert all options to "sane" settings (sane is a built-in combo of a lot of stty options)


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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
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

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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