All commands (14,187)

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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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Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
This version uses netcat to check a particular service.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Make shell (script) low priority. Use for non interactive tasks

An easter egg built into python to give you the Zen of Python

Start an X app remotely
Launch a gui app remotely. In this example smplayer is installed on the remote machine, and movie.avi is in the remote user's home dir. Note that stdout/stderr is still local, so you'll have feedback locally, add '&>/dev/null' to suppress. This is surprisingly not well known (compared to running an X app locally via ssh -X). (NB. if your distro requires ~/.Xauthority file present, then try -fX if you have problems) Resubmitted (and trimmed, thanks sitaram) due to ridiculous voting on previous submission. Fingers crossed, it gets a better rating this time.

Identify differences between directories (possibly on different servers)
This can be much faster than downloading one or both trees to a common servers and comparing the files there. After, only those files could be copied down for deeper comparison if needed.

output your microphone to a remote computer's speaker
This will output the sound from your microphone port to the ssh target computer's speaker port. The sound quality is very bad, so you will hear a lot of hissing.

Calculate the mean or average of a single column of numbers in a text file
single-column-numbers.txt is a text file with 22658 rows (numbers) in a single column. Each number can range from 0 to 134298679.533591 and the dot is for the decimals. This is done with perl because awk can't sum such high numbers.

Rip a video for archiving, from any site
Download video files from a bunch of sites (here is a list https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html). The options say: base filename on title, ignores errors and continue partial downloads. Also, stores some metadata into a .json file plz. Paste youtube users and playlists for extra fun. Protip: git-annex loves these files

open two files side by side in vim (one window, two panes)


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