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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 Mac address

Burn a directory of mp3s to an audio cd.
This uses mpg123 to convert the files to wav before burning, but you can use mplayer or mencoder or ffmpeg or lame with the --decode option, or whatever you like.

find the biggest files recursively, no matter how many
This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit. This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

Create the signature base string required for a Twitter stream feed
This is the SECOND command in a set for five that are needed for a Twitter stream feed. This command creates variable "b", the so-called "base string" required for oauth in Twitter stream feed requests. (The 256 char limit prevents giving it a better name) We use five environment variables created by a previous step: id, k1, once, ts and k3. The five environment variables are created in a separate command, please see my other commands. For more information on the signature base string, see dev.twitter.com/apps, click on any app (or create a new one) and then go to the "OAuth Tool" tab.

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"

Rotate a video file by 90 degrees CW

Get the list of local files that changed since their last upload in an S3 bucket
Can be useful to granulary flush files in a CDN after they've been changed in the S3 bucket.

Convert seconds to human-readable format
This example, for example, produces the output, "Fri Feb 13 15:26:30 EST 2009"

list files recursively by size

Connect to google talk through ssh by setting your IM client to use the localhost 5432 port
If your firewall or proxy at your location prevents connection to a particular host or port, you can use ssh to tunnel to your home server and do it there instead.


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