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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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print first n characters of any file in human readble form using hexdump
Usefull to determine unknown file type

Show complete URL in netstat output
The -W switch of netstat makes it print complete URL of the connections, which otherwise by default is truncated to fit its default column size. Now to compensate for irregular column sizes, pipe the output to column (-t switch of column prints in tabular form). The only downside to this part is that the very first row, the header, goes pear shape.

change dinosaur poop into gold
if firefox is running the database is locked, so you need to copy the places.sqlite file temporarily somewhere to be able to query it...

Print info about your real user.
To get your effective user: whoami

Scrollable Colorized Long Listing - Hidden Files Sorted Last
To sort hidden files first, simply switch the two inner `ls` commands. I have this aliased to `dira` `dir` is aliased to the simpler version with no hidden files: $ ls -l --color=always | less -R

quick integer CPU benchmark
This is a quick and dirty way to generate a (non-floating-point) CPU-bound task to benchmark. Adjust "20" to higher or lower values, as needed. As a benchmark this is probably a little less bogus than bogomips, and it will run anywhere 'bc' does.

Open a file explorer on a split screen inside your vim session
Open a CLI file explorer by splitting up your screen inside your vim session. Besides, you probably are never going to forget this one.

Remove color codes (special characters) with sed

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Download all music files off of a website using wget
This will download all files of the type specified after "-A" from a website. Here is a breakdown of the options: -r turns on recursion and downloads all links on page -l1 goes only one level of links into the page(this is really important when using -r) -H spans domains meaning it will download links to sites that don't have the same domain -nd means put all the downloads in the current directory instead of making all the directories in the path -A mp3 filters to only download links that are mp3s(this can be a comma separated list of different file formats to search for multiple types) -e robots=off just means to ignore the robots.txt file which stops programs like wget from crashing the site... sorry http://example/url lol..


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