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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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Merges given files line by line
In the above example all files have 4 lines. In "file1" consecutive lines are: "num, 1, 2, 3", in "file2": "name, Jack, Jim, Frank" and in "file3": "scores, 1300, 1100, 980". This one liner can save considerate ammount of time when you're trying to process serious portions of data. "-d" option allows one to set series of characters to be used as separators between data originating from given files.

Mute xterm
Disable the annoying beep in xterm

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Remove duplicate rows of an un-sorted file based on a single column
The command (above) will remove any duplicate rows based on the FIRST column of data in an un-sorted file. The '$1' represents a positional parameter. You can change both instances of '$1' in the command to remove duplicates based on a different column, for instance, the third: $ awk '{ if ($3 in stored_lines) x=1; else print; stored_lines[$3]=1 }' infile.txt > outfile.txt Or you can change it to '$0' to base the removal on the whole row: $ awk '{ if ($0 in stored_lines) x=1; else print; stored_lines[$0]=1 }' infile.txt > outfile.txt ** Note: I wouldn't use this on a MASSIVE file, unless you're RAM-rich ;) **

To have only unique lines in a file

Grab just the title of a youtube video
There's another version on here that uses GET but some people don't have lwp-request, so here's an alternative. It's also a little shorter and should work with most youtube URLs since it truncates at the first &

Adding formatting to an xml document for easier reading
This will indent the input to be more readable. Warnings and messages are not send to STDOUT so you can just use a pipe to create the formatted outputfile, like: $ tidy -i -xml in.xml > out.xml

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

list files recursively by size

Time Synchronisation with NTP


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