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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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Extract audio from a video

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

Change every instance of OLD to NEW in file FILE
Very quick way to change a word in a file. I use it all the time to change variable names in my PHP scripts (sed -i 's/$oldvar/$newvar/g' index.php)

show each new entry in system messages as a popup
It willl popup a message for each new entry in /var/log/messages found on the notify-send howto page on ubuntuforums.org. Posted here only because it is one of the favourites of mine.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

List symbols from a dynamic library (.so file)
You can get what functions at which addresses are inside a dynamic link library by this tool.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Create POSIX tar archive
tar(1) and cpio(1) are not fully platform agnostic, although their file formats are specified in POSIX.1-2001. As such, GNU tar(1) might not be able to extract a BSD tar(1) archive, and ivce versa. pax(1) is defined in POSIX.1-2001. To extract an archive: $ pax -rf archive.tar

Size (in bytes) of all RPM packages installed
This command will output the size of all RPM packages and string them together into one enormous addition command which will be calculated by the echo $(( ))

count files by type
displays a list of all file extensions in current directory and how many files there are of each type of extension in ascending order (case insensitive)


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