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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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Search inside a folder of jar/zip files
Great for finding which jar some pesky class is hiding in!

intercept stdout/stderr of another process or disowned process
Useful to recover a output(stdout and stderr) "disown"ed or "nohup"ep process of other instance of ssh. With the others options the stdout / stderr is intercepted, but only the first n chars. This way we can recover ALL text of stdout or stderr

Position the cursor under the current directory line
In case you're like me and like your commands to start on clean lines, especially when you're deep into a 10-level directory tree. This can be added to .bashrc.

Replaces a color in a PDF document, useful for removing a dark background before printing.
The pdf is first converted to a bitmap, so change "-density" to match your printer resolution. Also be careful about the RAM required. In this example rgb(0,0,0) is replaced by rgb(255,255,255), change to suit your needs.

Batch Convert SVG to PNG (in parallel)
Convert some SVG files into PNG using ImageMagick's convert command. Run the conversions in parallel to save time. This is safer than robinro's forkbomb approach :-) xargs runs four processes at a time -P4

pdfcount: get number of pages in a PDF file

Colorize grep output

Cut the first 'N' characters of a line
You can also cut charactes starting from X to N.

Multiple variable assignments from command output in BASH
It's quite easy to capture the output of a command and assign it in a shell's variable: $ day=$(date +%d) $ month=$(date +%m) But, what if we want to perform the same task with just one program invocation? Here comes the power of eval! date(1) outputs a string like "day=29; month=07; year=11" (notice the semicolons I added on purpose at date's custom output) which is a legal shell line. This like is then parsed and executed by the shell once again with the help of eval. Just setting 3 variables! Inspired by LinuxJournal's column "Dave Taylor's Work the Shell".

Time Synchronisation with NTP


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