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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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ASCII webcam live stream video using mplayer
Mplayer starts a webcam capture using ASCII art. Only mplayer required

Cleanup firefox's database.
Sqlite database keeps collecting cruft as time passes, which can be cleaned by the 'vacuum;' command. This command cleans up the cruft in all sqlite files relating to the user you have logged in as. This command has to be run when firefox is not running, or it will exit displaying the pid of the firefox running.

grep binary (hexadecimal) patterns
-P activates the Perl regular expression mode.

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"

Search and play youtube videos directly to terminal (no X needed)
pyt 'Stairway to heaven - Led Zeppelin' pyt 'brain damage - Pink Floyd' No web browser or even X needed. Just a cli and internet connection! mplayer is pauseable and can skip ahead This may break if youtube changes their search html.

tree by modify time with newest file at bottom
Go look at sample output first This is kind of like the ls command but displays by modify time with size, date and color. The newest files at the bottom of the screen (reverse using tac)

Fibonacci numbers with awk
recursive version, "pure" AWK

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"

Send email with curl and gmail
Required curl version >=7.21; using ~/.netrc for authorization

Display connections histogram
Displays a connection histogram of active tcp connections. Works even better under an alias. Thanks @Areis1 for sharing this one.


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