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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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date offset calculations
The date command does offset calculations nicely, handles concepts like "a month" as you'd expect, and is good for offsets of at least 100M years in either direction.

List all symbolic links in current directory
For those who don't have the symlinks command, you can use readlink. This command is not straightforward because readlink is very picky. The backslash in front of 'ls' means not to use an alias (e.g. color escape codes from an aliased 'ls' could mess up readlink), and the -1 (one) means to print the entries separated by newlines. xargs -l (the letter L) means to process each input separated by newlines as separate commands.

restoring some data from a corrupted text file
man tac When there is a bad block in the middle of your file, you can see its begninning with `cat' and its end with `tac'. But both commands terminates with an error. So this sequence rebuilds a new file without badblock.

Print all open regular files sorted by the number of file handles open to each.
This command run fine on my Ubuntu machine, but on Red Hat I had to change the awk command to `awk '{print $10}'`.

Download entire commandlinefu archive to single file
'jot' does not come with most *nix distros, so we need to use seq to make it work. This version tested good on Fedora 11.

Find the package that installed a command

Extract neatly a rar compressed file
It's also possible to delay the extraction (echo "unrar e ... fi" |at now+20 minutes) wich is really convenient!

Synchronise a file from a remote server
You will be prompted for a password unless you have your public keys set-up.

Short URLs with is.gd
No curl and no sed, just wget :)

Speak the top 6 lines of your twitter timeline every 5 minutes.....
Pump up the chatter, run this script on a regular basis to listen to your twitter timeline. This is a rough first cut using several cli clips I have spotted around. There is no facility to not read those things already read to you. This could also easily be put in a loop for timed onslaught from the chatterverse, though I think it might violate several pointsof the Geneva Convention UPDATE - added a loop, only reads the first 6 twits, and does this every 5 mins.


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