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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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Rsync remote data as root using sudo
If your user has sudo on the remote box, you can rsync data as root without needing to login as root. This is very helpful if the remote box does not allow root to login over SSH (which is a common security restriction).

Run a command for a given time
or "Execute a command with a timeout" Run a command in background, sleep 10 seconds, kill it. $! is the process id of the most recently executed background command. You can test it with: find /& sleep10; kill $!

Find how much of your life you've wasted coding in the current directory
Finds all C++, Python, SWIG files in your present directory (uses "*" rather than "." to exclude invisibles) and counts how many lines are in them. Returns only the last line (the total).

Recursively grep for string and format output for vi(m)
This is a big time saver for me. I often grep source code and need to edit the findings. A single highlight of the mouse and middle mouse click (in gnome terminal) and I'm editing the exact line I just found. The color highlighting helps interpret the data.

throttle bandwidth with cstream
this bzips a folder and transfers it over the network to "host" at 777k bit/s. cstream can do a lot more, have a look http://www.cons.org/cracauer/cstream.html#usage for example: $ echo w00t, i'm 733+ | cstream -b1 -t2 hehe :)

Rename all files in a directory to the md5 hash

Make a DVD ISO Image from a VIDEO_TS folder on MacOSX
/path/ is the root folder of the DVD, not the VIDEO_TS folder.

Convert deb to rpm
converts between Red Hat rpm, Debian deb, Stampede slp, Slackware tgz, and Solaris pkg file formats ... It also supports LSB packages.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

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"


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