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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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Get info about a GitHub project
In this example we search for 'vim' but vim doesn't have a project on github right now. That's ok, this command still searches for every project that has 'vim' in their description (forks, plugins, etc). To get XML or JSON output just replace 'yaml' in the url with 'xml' or 'json'.

String to binary
Cool but useless.

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions - (Open)solaris version with RBAC

List all execs in $PATH, usefull for grepping the resulting list
While it seems (to me at least) a little counter-intuitive to filter on name first, this requires less work for find, as it allows it to immediately discount any files that do not match the name directly from the directory listing on disk. Querying against file attributes requires reading the file attributes, which is performed for all files matching any name based predicates.

tar a directory and send it to netcat
tar's directory and sends to netcat listening on port 10000 On the client end: netcat [server ip] 10000 | tar xfvz - This will send it over the network and extract it on the clients machine.

Bind a key with a command
the -x option is for binding to a shell command

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (run this command as root!)
It's the same like 'cp -p' if available. It's faster over networks than scp. If you have to copy gigs of data you could also use netcat and the tar -z option in conjunction -- on the receiving end do: # nc -l 7000 | tar -xzvpf - ...and on the sending end do: # tar -czf - * | nc otherhost 7000

Push your present working directory to a stack that you can pop later
If are a Bash user and you are in a directory and need to go else where for a while but don't want to lose where you were, use pushd instead of cd. cd /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget pushd /tmp cd thing/in/tmp popd (returns you to /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget)

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Substitute spaces in filename with underscore
Substitute spaces in filename with underscore, it work on the first space encountered.


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