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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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"What the hell is running on?!" Easily snoop your system's RAM consumption
Works on most unixes, on OpenBSD replace the "-g" parameter at the sort with a "-n".

Convert embedded spaces in filenames to "_" (underscore)
This command converts filenames with embedded spaces in the current directory replacing spaces with the underscore ("_") character.

Print all /etc/passwd lines with duplicated uid
Prints all the lines in /etc/passwd belonging to users with a duplicated uid. It also adds the hostname to the beginning of the line. It's been tested in AIX, Solaris and Linux.

list files recursively by size

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Rename files in batch

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

scan folder to check syntax error in php files

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

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


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