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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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Vectorize xkcd strips
Uses ImageMagick and potrace to vectorize the input image, with parameters optimized for xkcd-like pictures.

search string in _all_ revisions

cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

ls not pattern
Hides some entries from listing.

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
If you want to do the same in OS X... grep as necessary for information you need....

host - DNS lookup utility
host is a simple utility for performing DNS lookups. It is normally used to convert names to IP addresses and vice versa. When no arguments or options are given, host prints a short summary of its command line arguments and options.

Take a screenshot every 2 seconds
Take a screenshot every 2 seconds and save it as a png file

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"

Copy structure
Copies a dir structure without the files in it.

Run a command multiple times with different subcommands
it's nice to be able to use the command `ls program.{h,c,cpp}`. This expands to `ls program.h program.c program.cpp`. Note: This is a text expansion, not a shell wildcard type expansion that looks at matching file names to calculate the expansion. More details at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bash-brace-expansion I often run multiple commands (like apt-get) one after the other with different subcommands. Just for fun this wraps the whole thing into a single line that uses brace expansion.


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