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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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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.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Record audio and video from webcam using ffmpeg
Record from a webcam, audio using ALSA encoded as MP3, video as MPEG-4.

Get the total length of time in hours:minutes:seconds (HH:MM:SS) of all video (or audio) in the current dir (and below)
change the *.avi to whatever you want to match, you can remove it altogether if you want to check all files.

Search and play youtube videos directly to terminal (no X needed)
pyt 'Stairway to heaven - Led Zeppelin' pyt 'brain damage - Pink Floyd' No web browser or even X needed. Just a cli and internet connection! mplayer is pauseable and can skip ahead This may break if youtube changes their search html.

Plot frequency distribution of words from files on a terminal.
Uses the dumb terminal option in gnuplot to plot a graph of frequencies. In this case, we are looking at a frequency analysis of words in all of the .c files.

Day of the week of your birthday over the years.
Do you ever want to know which day of week was your birhday! Now you can check that with this command, just set your birh date at the beginning (My bday in the example) and the dates will be revealed. ;)

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Backup a directory structure
Copies a directory structure from /home/ to /backups/home (notice that the destination does not have a trailing slash)

Find the package that installed a command


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