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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 a stream feed from a Twitter user
*** CAREFULLY READ THE NOTES **** *** THIS DOES NOT WORK "OUT OF THE BOX" *** You'll need a few minutes of CAREFUL reading before making your own Twitter feed: In 2010 simple command line Twitter feed requests all stopped working because Twitter upgraded to SSL security. Https requests for a filtered Twitter stream feed now require a special header called "oauth_header". The benefit is that your stream feed and login info is securely encrypted. The bad news is that an "oauth_header" takes some work to build. Fortunately, four functions, imaginatively named step1, step2, step3 and step4 can be used to build a customized oauth_header for you in a few minutes. Now, go look at "step1" to start creating your own oauth_header!

Have a random "cow" say a random thing
You need to have fortune and cowsay installed. It uses a subshell to list cow files in you cow directory (this folder is default for debian based systems, others might use another folder). you can add it to your .bashrc file to have it great you with something interesting every time you start a new session.

Synthesize text as speech
The Festival Speech Synthesis System converts text into sound. Or: links -dump http://youfavoritewebsite.com | festival --tts

Null a file with sudo

Determine if a port is open with bash
For times when netcat isn't available. Will throw a Connection refused message if a port is closed. Scriptable: $ (: /dev/null && echo "OPEN" || echo "CLOSED"

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.

Set a posix shell to echo all commands that it's about to execute, after all expansions have been done.
the 'set -x' mode can be exited by typing $ set +x

Speaking alarm clock
This ran on a ubuntu box using espeak for speaking text with the bash shell. On a mac you should use 'say'. Also you can change your alarm interval and your snooze interval which are currently 8 hours and 1 minute. I would run this via cron yet it's easier to disable if you run it as a command like this :P

Top 10 Memory Processes
It displays the top 10 processes sorted by memory usage

Show line numbers in a text file


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

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