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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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how many pages will my text files print on?
This gives a very rough estimate of how many pages your text files will print on. Assumes 60 lines per page, and does not take long lines into account.

World Cup Live Score
World Cup Live Score of the ongoing match. Alternative to have the live score with the match statistics: $ watch -n10 --no-title "w3m http://www.livescore.com/ |awk '/live [0-9H]+[^ ]/,/red cards/'"

Grep only files matching certain pattern (Advanced)

colorize comm output
It just colorizes the line based on if it has 0, 1 or 2 tabs at the beginning of the line. Won't work so well if lines already begin with tabs (too bad comm doesn't have an option to substitute \t for something else). Don't forget comm needs input files to be sorted. You can use a shortcut like this with bash: comm

Smart renaming
A powerfull way to rename file using sed groups. & stand for the matched expression. \1 referes to the first group between parenthesis. \2 to the second.

Replicate a directory structure dropping the files

Create a backup of file being edited while using vi
At the start of a vi session and *before* saving any changes use ":!cp % %-" to make a backup of the current file being edited. example: vi /data/some/long/path/file :!cp% %- creates /data/some/long/path/file-

Permanent mysql ssh tunnel to server

Converts all windows .URL shortcuts in a directory to linux (gnome) .desktop shortcuts

Find files and list them sorted by modification time
This uses the ability of find (at least the one from GNU findutils that is shiped with most linux distros) to display change time as part of its output. No xargs needed.


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