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

Define a quick calculator function
POSIX compliant arithmetic evaluation. = 10*2+3

Clear the terminal screen

Matrix Style

Wait for file to stop changing
Here's a way to wait for a file (a download, a logfile, etc) to stop changing, then do something. As written it will just return to the prompt, but you could add a "; echo DONE" or whatever at the end. This just compares the full output of "ls" every 10 seconds, and keeps going as long as that output has changed since the last interval. If the file is being appended to, the size will change, and if it's being modified without growing, the timestamp from the "--full-time" option will have changed. The output of just "ls -l" isn't sufficient since by default it doesn't show seconds, just minutes. Waiting for a file to stop changing is not a very elegant or reliable way to measure that some process is finished - if you know the process ID there are much better ways. This method will also give a false positive if the changes to the target file are delayed longer than the sleep interval for any reason (network timeouts, etc). But sometimes the process that is writing the file doesn't exit, rather it continues on doing something else, so this approach can be useful if you understand its limitations.

Multiple SSH Tunnels
Thankfully, the ssh command allows you to specify multiple tunnels through the same server in one command. Remeber if you want a priviliged port on your machine, you must use root or sudo account.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

uniq without pre-sorting
Reads stdin, and outputs each line only once - without sorting ahead of time. This does use more memory than your system's sort utility.

Kill google chrome process

Check apache config syntax and restart or edit the file
Checks the apache configuration syntax, if is OK then restart the service otherwise opens the configuration file with VIM on the line where the configuration fails.


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