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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 if a domain is available and get the answer in just one line
Returns nothing if the domain exists and 'No match for domain.com' otherwise.

remote-pbzip2 and transfer a directory to local file

auto complete arguments
Use it for command like : mkdir, chown, ls, less...

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

Serial console to a Vmware VM
Create a serial console with "socket (named pipe)" of "/tmp/socket", "from:server, to:virtual machine" in vmware player, etc.. gui. Run the above command after you have booted the guest OS (which should also be configured for serial console).

list files recursively by size

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

New Maintainer for CommandLineFu
Welcome to Jon H. (@fart), the new maintainer of CommandLineFu. . In the absence of a forum, I encourage people welcome him, here, in the comments. . Also... What would you like to improve/change about the site?


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