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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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Copy a file to a new directory created on the fly
You need to cp, mv, scp, ..., some files around from one place to another, and after having laboriously typed out the source path, you remember that the destination directory doesn't yet exist, and so the command will fail. So rather than killing the command line and starting over, just interpolate the results of creating the directory and echo its name. You could DRY this with a for; do; done, but that may be more trouble than it's worth.

gpg decrypt several files
Change directory (cd) to the directory where all your encrypted files are placed, and then run the command - then you are asked to insert your secret gpg password - ubuntu 8.04

Create Encrypted WordPress MySQL Backup without any DB details, just the wp-config.php
The coolest way I've found to backup a wordpress mysql database using encryption, and using local variables created directly from the wp-config.php file so that you don't have to type them- which would allow someone sniffing your terminal or viewing your shell history to see your info. I use a variation of this for my servers that have hundreds of wordpress installs and databases by using a find command for the wp-config.php file and passing that through xargs to my function.

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

backup local MySQL database into a folder and removes older then 5 days backups

Query Wikipedia via console over DNS

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"

Quickly analyse an Apache error log
This searches the Apache error_log for each of the 5 most significant Apache error levels, if any are found the date is then cut from the output in order to sort then print the most common occurrence of each error.

List your installed Firefox extensions

Perform sed substitution on all but the last line of input
In this simple example the command will add a comma to the end of every line except the last. I found this really useful when programatically constructing sql scripts. See sample output for example.


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