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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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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.

Find all the files more than 10MB, sort in descending order of size and record the output of filenames and size in a text file.
This command specifies the size in Kilobytes using 'k' in the -size +(N)k option. The plus sign says greater than. -exec [cmd] {} \; invokes ls -l command on each file and awk strips off the values of the 5th (size) and the 9th (filename) column from the ls -l output to display. Sort is done in reversed order (descending) numerically using sort -rn options. A cron job could be run to execute a script like this and alert the users if a dir has files exceeding certain size, and provide file details as well.

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

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS

Comparison between the execution output of the last and penultimate command
Useful for checking if there are differences between last and penultimate command.

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

Open Sublime-text in current directory

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

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"

Open (in vim) all modified files in a git repository
The option --porcelain makes the output of git easier to parse. This one-liner may not work if there is a space in the modified file name.


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