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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 package that installed a command

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 files recursively by size

clean up memory of unnecessary things (Kernerl 2.6.16 or newer)
run sync first to flush useful things out to disk!!! To free pagecache: echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To free dentries and inodes: echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To free pagecache, dentries and inodes: echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Currency Conversion
This works in Mac OS X (10.6.2) (natively comes with curl) usage: currency_convert $1(amount) $2(from_denomination) $3(to_denomination)

ubuntu tasksel
The command tasksel allows the choice of packages from the command line to get predefined configurations for specific services (usually this option is offered during installation).

list files recursively by size

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"

Compare two CSV files, discarding any repeated lines
The value for the sort command's -k argument is the column in the CSV file to sort on. In this example, it sorts on the second column. You must use some form of the sort command in order for uniq to work properly.

Delete only binary files in a directory
Please note that binary file checking is NOT perfect. So, use it with caution. It does not delete hidden files whose name has a leading '.' character. And it regards an empty file as a binary file.


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