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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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Retrieve the size of a file on a server
Downloads the entire file, but http servers don't always provide the optional 'Content-Length:' header, and ftp/gopher/dict/etc servers don't provide a filesize header at all.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
Your platform may not have pv by default. If you are using Homebew on OSX, simply 'brew install pv'.

Kick user

Remove several files with ease
Rather than typing out all 10 files, you can use brace expansion to do the trick for you. This is useful for backup files, numbered files, or any files with a repeating pattern. Gives more control than 'rm file*' as I might want to keep others around.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

archlinux: shows list of files installed by a package
Shows the files which the package, for example gvim, installed on your system.

Use find to get around Argument list too long problem
Can be used for other commands as well, replace rm with ls. It is easy to make this shorter but if the filenames involved have spaces, you will need to do use find's "-print0" option in conjunction with xargs's "-0" option. Otherwise the shell that xargs uses to execute the "rm" command line will treat the space as a token separator, thereby treating the name as two (or more) names.

GZip all files in a directory separately


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