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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.

find files containing text
-l outputs only the file names -i ignores the case -r descends into subdirectories

Simulate typing
This will output the characters at 10 per second.

Remove all the files except abc in the directory
Finds all files in the current directory and deletes them besides file called "abc"

Reboot as a different OS in Grub
This will reboot as the Grub 2 option.

bash or tcsh redirect both to stdout and to a file
When plumbers use pipes, they sometimes need a T-joint. The Unix equivalent to this is 'tee'. The -a flag tells 'tee' to append to the file, rather than clobbering it. Tested on bash and tcsh.

Count to 65535 in binary (for no apparent reason)
Yes, it's useless.

Show your current network interface in use

Find Duplicate Files (based on MD5 hash) -- For Mac OS X
This works on Mac OS X using the `md5` command instead of `md5sum`, which works similarly, but has a different output format. Note that this only prints the name of the duplicates, not the original file. This is handy because you can add `| xargs rm` to the end of the command to delete all the duplicates while leaving the original.

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.


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