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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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play high-res video files on a slow processor
Certain codecs in high res don't play so well on my Dell Mini 9. Using this command, I can play just about anything and it keeps the sound in sync to boot!

tar+pbzip2 a dir

tcpdump from src to dst
then open with wireshark

List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu)

list with full path

check open ports
Tested in Linux and OSX

Backup a remote database to your local filesystem
I have this on a daily cronjob to backup the commandlinefu.com database from NearlyFreeSpeech.net (awesome hosts by the way) to my local drive. Note that (on my Ubuntu system at least) you need to escape the % signs on the crontab.

Put a console clock in top right corner
This puts a clock in the top right of the terminal. This version doesn't use tput, but uses escape codes

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

bash pause command
Just added -sn1 -s = silent -n1 = only one symbol needed to continue after the insert


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