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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 the package that installed a command

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Upload images to omploader.org from the command line.
This function uploads images to http://omploader.org and then prints out the links to the file. Some coloring can also be added to the command with: $ompload() { curl -F file1=@"$1" http://omploader.org/upload|awk '/Info:|File:|Thumbnail:|BBCode:/{gsub(/

Convert Youtube videos to MP3
youtube-dl has this functionality built in. If you're running an older version of youtube-dl, you can update it using `youtube-dl -U` (although if you have an older version, it probably doesn't download youtube videos anyway.) youtube-dl --help will show you other options that may come in useful.

statistics in one line
In this example, file contains five columns where first column is text. Variance is calculated for columns 2 - 5 by using perl module Statistics::Descriptive. There are many more statistical functions available in the module.

Swap the two last arguments of the current command line
Say you just typed a long command like this: $ rsync -navupogz --delete /long/path/to/dir_a /very/long/path/to/dir_b but you really want to sync dir_b to dir_a. Instead of rewriting all the command line, just type followed by , and your command line will read $ rsync -navupogz --delete /very/long/path/to/dir_b /long/path/to/dir_a

Testing php configuration

Recall last argument of previous command
!$ recalls the last argument of the previous command. This is very useful when you have to operate several operations on the same file for example.

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

prevent accidents and test your command with echo
if you're using wildcards * or ? in your command, and if you're deleting, moving multiple files, it's always safe to see how those wildcards will expand. if you put "echo" in front of your command, the expanded form of your command will be printed. It's better safe than sorry.


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