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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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Print info about your real user.
To get your effective user: whoami

Project your desktop using xrandr
HDMI-1 is the interface in the example, which can be obtained just by typing xrandr and surfing through the output. There are a hell lot of configurations that can be done but I prefer auto because it works in most cases. $ Lifesaver

Use /dev/full to test language I/O-failsafety
The Linux /dev/full file simulates a "disk full" condition, and can be used to verify how a program handles this situation. In particular, several programming language implementations do not print error diagnostics (nor exit with error status) when I/O errors like this occur, unless the programmer has taken additional steps. That is, simple code in these languages does not fail safely. In addition to Perl, C, C++, Tcl, and Lua (for some functions) also appear not to fail safely.

Quickly get summary of sizes for files and folders
Use this as a quick and simple alternative to the slightly verbose "du -s --max-depth=1"

Make backups recurse through directories

Get line number of all matches in a file

Use curl to save an MP3 stream
I use this with cron to timeshift radio programs from a station's live stream. You will get an error message at the end like "curl: (28) Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 185574 bytes received"; to suppress that but not other error messages, you can append "2>&1 | grep -v "(28)"" to the end of the command.

Updated top ten memory utilizing processes (child/instance aggregation) now with percentages of total RAM
Prints the top 10 memory consuming processes (with children and instances aggregated) sorted by total RSS and calculates the percentage of total RAM each uses. Please note that since RSS can include shared libraries it is possible for the percentages to add up to more that the total amount of RAM, but this still gives you a pretty good idea. Also note that this does not work with the mawk version of awk, but it works fine with GNU Awk which is on most Linux systems. It also does not work on OS X.

Find files of two different extensions and copy them to a directory

list files recursively by size


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