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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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power off system in X hours form the current time, here X=2

Get the SUM of visual blocked digits in vim

Extract audio from start to end position from a video
mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm Firefly\ ep\ 10.avi -ss 195 -endpos 246 Will create file audiodump.wav with audio from second 195 to second 246 (the opnening theme).

Show all symlinks

shell equivalent of a boss button
Nobody wants the boss to notice when you're slacking off. This will fill your shell with random data, parts of it highlighted. Note that 'highlight' is the Perl module App::highlight, not "a universal sourcecode to formatted text converter." You'll also need Term::ANSIColor.

Get the Nth argument of the last command (handling spaces correctly)
Bash's history expansion character, "!", has many features, including "!:" for choosing a specific argument (or range of arguments) from the history. The gist is any number after !: is the number of the argument you want, with !:1 being the first argument and !:0 being the command. See the sample output for a few examples. For full details search for "^HISTORY EXPANSION" in the bash(1) man page.    Note that this version improves on the previous function in that it handles arguments that include whitespace correctly.

Securely destroy data on given device
Intentional hash in the beginning. May run a looong time. Wipes your data for real. Was meant to be /dev/urandom - I mistyped it. :-)

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

Create an alias, store it in ~/.bash_aliases and source your new alias into the ~/.bashrc
This is useful if you use a shell with a lot of other users. You will be able to run "topu" to see your running processes instead of the complete 'top -u username'. Read more on alias: http://man.cx/alias

Change the ownership of all files owned by one user.
Finds all files in /home owned by UID 1056 and changes to 2056.


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