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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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Remove several files with ease
Rather than typing out all 10 files, you can use brace expansion to do the trick for you. This is useful for backup files, numbered files, or any files with a repeating pattern. Gives more control than 'rm file*' as I might want to keep others around.

Counts number of lines (in source code excluding comments)
I took java to make the find command simpler and to state that it works for any language supported by cpp. cpp is the C/C++ preprocessor (interprets macros, removes comments, inserts includes, resolves trigraphs). The -fpreprocessor option tells cpp to assume the input has already been preprocessed so it will only replace comment lines with blank lines. The -L 1 option tells xargs to launch one process for each line, indeed cpp can only process one file at the time...

Mount a VMware virtual disk (.vmdk) file on a Linux box
Assumes XP/2000/2003. For Server 2008+ try offset=105,906,176 You can find this number in the System Information utility under Partition Starting Offset. UEFI based boxes you want partition 2 since the first is just the boot files (and FAT). This works with (storage side) snapshots which is handy for single file restores on NFS mounted VMware systems

Rename files in batch

Save xkcd to a pdf with captions
Saves to a PDF with title and alt text of comic. As asked for on http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=91100 Change xkcd.com to dynamic.xkcd.com/comics/random for a random comic.

How to secure delete a file
Instead, install apt-get install secure-delete and you can use: -- srm to delete file and directory on hard disk -- smem to delete file in RAM -- sfill to delete "free space" on hard disk -- sswap to delete all data from swap

Switch 2 characters on a command line.
If you typed 'sl', put the cursor on the 'l' and hit ctrl-t to get 'ls'.

Execute a command without saving it in the history
Prepending one or more spaces to your command won't be saved in history. Useful for pr0n or passwords on the commandline. Tested on BASH.

Execute a command at a given time
This is an alternative to cron which allows a one-off task to be scheduled for a certain time.

mysql DB size


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