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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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Display total Kb/Mb/Gb of a folder and each file

Webcam view with vlc
Quick command to test your webcam. Press 'f' to toggle fullscreen. Can also use 'vlc v4l2://' if you want gui controls. For higher/smoother framerate lower the default resolution: $ cvlc v4l2:// :v4l2-width=320 :v4l2-height=240 &

Pretty-print user/group info for a given user

search string in _all_ revisions

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

live ssh network throughput test
connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null needs pv installed Debian: 'apt-get install pv' Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

Pull git submodules in parallel using GNU parallel
Make sure to run this command in your git toplevel directory. Modify `-j4` as you like. You can also run any arbitrary command beside `git pull` in parallel on all of your git submodules.

Merge files, joining each line in one line

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Display which distro is installed


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