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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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find the difference between two nodes

Go to parent directory of filename edited in last command

Paged, colored svn diff
I put this in a shell script called "svndiff", as it provides a handy decorated "svn diff" output that is colored (which you can't see here) and paged. The -r is required so less doesn't mangle the color codes.

Generate random number with shuf
If you don't have seq or shuf, bash can be used.

Rolling upgrades via aptitude
This has been my "sysupgrade" alias since ca. 2006, first used on Debian Sid, then Sabayon, and it still does its duty on Mint nowadays without breaking stuff.

A one-line web server in Ruby
Here's how to serve a directory in one line of Ruby. Handy for sharing files at a conference, for example.

Print only the odd lines of a file
NR%2 == 1 on odd lines and 0 on even lines

Add a line to a file using sudo
This is the solution to the common mistake made by sudo newbies, since $ sudo echo "foo bar" >> /path/to/some/file does NOT add to the file as root. Alternatively, $ sudo echo "foo bar" > /path/to/some/file should be replaced by $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee /path/to/some/file And you can add a >/dev/null in the end if you're not interested in the tee stdout : $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee -a /path/to/some/file >/dev/null

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"

Combine two mp3's or more into 1 long mp3
This just combines multiple mp3's into one mp3 file. Basically it is a easy join for mp3's


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