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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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Prettify an XML file
Generated XML files often are poorly formatted. Use this command to properly indent and normalize the file in-place.

Easily run a program in the background without losing output
This function runs a program in the background, and logs all output to an automatically created logfile. That way, you can still get at the output without it clogging up your terminal. Tip: Throw fork() and this: $for prog in firefox kate konqueror ;do alias $prog="fork $prog";done into your bashrc, so that they'll automatically run out of the way.

Realtime lines per second in a log file
Using tail to follow and standard perl to count and print the lps when lines are written to the logfile.

list all file extensions in a directory
A shorter version

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

ring the bell

Give to anyone a command to immediatly find a particular part of a man.
Example : $ LC_ALL=C man less | less +/ppattern

Show directories in the PATH, one per line
This version uses Pipes, but is easier for the common user to grasp... instead of using sed or some other more complicated method, it uses the tr command

m4a to mp3 conversion with ffmpeg and lame
A batch file version of the same command would be: for f in *.m4a; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -acodec libmp3lame -ab 256k "${f%.m4a}.mp3"; done

Count git commits since specific commit


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