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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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socat TCP-LISTEN:5500 EXEC:'ssh user@remotehost "socat STDIO UNIX-CONNECT:/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock"'
Listens on local port 5500 and connects to remotehost with username user to tunnel the given socket file. Will work with anything, but can be useful if there's a need for a local application to connect with a remote server which was started without networking.

Isolate file name from full path/find output
Quick method of isolating filenames from a full path using expansion. Much quicker than using "basename"

Get all ip address for the host

Find dead symbolic links

Remove all cached images for icons related to your profile
Run inside Command Prompt (cmd.exe) as admin. Note that you must close explorer.exe first, and even so some files will not be deleted, will say "Access is denied." To definitely delete them enter with another admin user or from other operating system and access the drive.

Restore mysql database uncompressing on the fly.
This way you keep the file compressed saving disk space. Other way less optimal using named pipes: mysql -uroot -p'passwd' database <

Recursively change permissions on files, leave directories alone.

bash function to check for something every 5 seconds
checkfor: have the shell check anything you're waiting for. 'while : ; do' is an infinite loop '$*' executes the command passed in 'sleep 5' - change for your tastes, sleep for 5 seconds bash, ksh, likely sh, maybe zsh Ctrl-c to break the loop

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.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.


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