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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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Extract tarball from internet without local saving

Give to anyone a command to immediatly find a particular part of a man.
Example : $ LC_ALL=C man less | less +/ppattern

List just the executable files (or directories) in current directory
Does an 'ls' on just the files and directories in the current directory with an execute bit turned on. This version will list directories. Just tack on "-type f" to the start of the find to omit listing directories and list only files.

Kill a broken ssh connection
This is useful for example if you are on ssh in a server and the server goes down without letting you out. This is part of a larget sets of escape sequences provided by ssh. You can find them with ~? Here's the list: ~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions) ~B - send a BREAK to the remote system ~C - open a command line ~R - request rekey ~V/v - decrease/increase verbosity (LogLevel) ~^Z - suspend ssh ~# - list forwarded connections ~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate) ~? - this message ~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice (Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

Generate a playlist of all the files in the directory, newer first
I use this to generate a playlist with all the podcasts I listen to. Ordered from most recent to older.

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

Reducing image size
Adding the exclamation mark to the image geometry ignores the original aspect ratio. More info about image geometry: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/command-line-processing.php#geometry

fetch all revisions of a specific file in an SVN repository
Manages everything through one sed script instead of pipes of greps and awks. Quoting of shell variables is generally easier within a sed script.

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

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"


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