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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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Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
This will indent the input to be more readable. Warnings and messages are not send to STDOUT so you can just use a pipe to create the formatted outputfile, like: $ tidy -i -xml in.xml > out.xml

silent/shh - shorthand to make commands really quiet
Sometimes I just want to run a command quietly but all that keyboard shifting makes my fingers hurt. This little function does the job eg.: $ if shh type less; then PAGER=less; fi

sends your internal IP by email
This is useful if you have need to do port forwarding and your router doesn't assign static IPs, you can add it to a script in a cron job that checks if you IP as recently changed or with a trigger script. This was tested on Mac OSX.

Reads a CD/DVD and creates an dvdisaster iso image with the advanced RS02 method.

stream a youtube video with mpv where $1 is the youtube link.
opens a new session with video stream

Comment out all lines in a file beginning with string

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"

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

Prints any IP out of a file

Slightly better compressed archives
Avoids creating useless directory entries in archive, and sorts files by (roughly) extension, which is likely to group similar files together for better compression. 1%-5% improvement.


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