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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 files recursively by size

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Convert JSON to YAML

Print a file to a LPD server
You don't need cups =)

Type strait into a file from the terminal.
Takes input from the connected terminal and dumps it to the specified file. Stop writing and close file with control + D or the end of line character. Useful for copying+pasting large blobs of text over SSH to a new machine.

Get a free shell account on a community server
Bash process substitution which curls the website 'hashbang.sh' and executes the shell script embedded in the page. This is obviously not the most secure way to run something like this, and we will scold you if you try. The smarter way would be: Download locally over SSL > curl https://hashbang.sh >> hashbang.sh Verify integrty with GPG (If available) > gpg --recv-keys 0xD2C4C74D8FAA96F5 > gpg --verify hashbang.sh Inspect source code > less hashbang.sh Run > chmod +x hashbang.sh > ./hashbang.sh

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Open (in vim) all modified files in a git repository
The option --porcelain makes the output of git easier to parse. This one-liner may not work if there is a space in the modified file name.

for too many arguments by *
$ grep ERROR *.log -bash: /bin/grep: Argument list too long $ echo *.log | xargs grep ERROR /dev/null 20090119.00011.log:DANGEROUS ERROR


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