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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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Launch a VirtualBox virtual machine
You can use this on your session login.

Get the IP address

Check if a package is installed. If it is, the version number will be shown.
If the first two letters are "ii", then the package is installed. You can also use wildcards. For example, . $ dpkg -l openoffice* . Note that dpkg will usually not report packages which are available but uninstalled. If you want to see both which versions are installed and which versions are available, use this command instead: . $ apt-cache policy python

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

ASCII webcam live stream video using mplayer
Mplayer starts a webcam capture using ASCII art. Only mplayer required

Remove Thumbs.db files from folders
An alternative which uses the advanced zsh globbing (pattern matching)

The command used by applications in OS X to determine whether a plist is "good". from Ed Marczak.
The check an entire folder is a one-liner: plutil -lint * | grep -v OK$ from Ed Marczak

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
This shell function displays a list of binaries contained in an installed package; works on Debian based Linux distributions.

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Use all the cores or CPUs when compiling
Force make command to create as many compile processes as specified (4 in the example), so that each one goes into one core or CPU and compilation happens in parallel. This reduces the time required to compile a program by up to a half in the case of CPUs with 2 cores, one fourth in the case of quad cores... and so on.


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