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

Uniquely (sort of) color text so you can see changes
Colorify colors input by converting the text to a number and then performing modulo 7 on it. This resulting number is used as the color escape code. This can be used to color the results of commands with complex outputs (like "482279054165371") so if any of the digits change, there's a good chance the color will change too. I say good chance because there's only 7 unique colors here, so assuming you were watching random numbers, there would be a 6/7 chance that the color would change when the number changed. This should really only be used to help quickly identify when things change, but should not be the only thing relied upon to positively assert that an output has not changed.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Edit a file in vim (at the first error) if it is not well formed xml.
Validate a file using xmllint. If there are parser errors, edit the file in vim at the line of the first error.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Report all quota usage
Check disk quota for all user

Use Vim to convert text to HTML.
``vimhtml somefile.txt`` will open vim for the HTML convertion and close it immediately after its done, leaving you with somefile.html which you can later use in your website or whatever.

iso-8859-1 to utf-8 safe recursive rename
This command is a powerful "detoxifier" that eliminates special chars, spaces and all those little chars we don't like. It support several "sequences" so be sure to check your /usr/local/etc/detoxrc while at it... and maybe define your own

Use vi commands to edit your command lines
If you spend all day editing in vi then switching your fingers to Emacs mode just for the command line can be difficult. Use set -o vi in your bash shell and enjoy the power of a real editor.


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