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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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Sort movies by length, longest first
Sort .avi movies by time length, print the longest first, and so on...

Create a CD/DVD ISO image from disk.
Many like to use 'dd' for creating CD/DVD iso images. This is bad. Very bad. The reason this is, is 'dd' doesn't have any built-in error checking. So, you don't know if you got all the bits or not. As such, it is not the right tool for the job. Instead, 'reaom' (read optical media) from the wodim package is what you should be using. It has built-in error checking. Similarly, if you want to burn your newly creating ISO, stay away from 'dd', and use: $ wodim -v -eject /path/to/image.iso

April Fools' Day Prank
Add this to a fiend's .bashrc. PROMPT_COMMAND will run just before a prompt is drawn. RANDOM will be between 0 and 32768; in this case, it'll run about 1/10th of the time. \033 is the escape character. I'll call it \e for short. \e7 -- save cursor position. \e[%d;%dH -- move cursor to absolute position \e[4%dm \e[m -- draw a random color at that point \e8 -- restore position.

Display Dilbert strip of the day
Requires display. Corrected version thanks to sputnick and eightmillion user.

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
Alternative to the ping check if your firewall blocks ping. Uses curl to get the landing page silently, or fail with an error code. You can probably do this with wget as well.

Insert the last command without the last argument (bash)
$/usr/sbin/ab2 -f TLS1 -S -n 1000 -c 100 -t 2 http://www.google.com/ then $!:- http://www.commandlinefu.com/ is the same as $/usr/sbin/ab2 -f TLS1 -S -n 1000 -c 100 -t 2 http://www.commandlinefu.com/

Multiple variable assignments from command output in BASH
No command substitution but subshell redirection

A very simple and useful stopwatch
time read -sn1 (s:silent, n:number of characters. Press any character to stop)

Create a CD/DVD ISO image from disk.

Remove multiple spaces
The command removes all the spaces whithin a file and leaves only one space.


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