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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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Email HTML content
Note, this works because smtp is running

make, or run a script, everytime a file in a directory is modified

Print stack trace of a core file without needing to enter gdb interactively
The pstack command prints a stack trace of running processes without needing to attach a debugger, but what about core files? The answer, of course, is to use this command. Usage: gdbbt program corefile

"I Feel Lucky" for Google Images
prompts for a search term and then pulls down the first result from google images

Show a 4-way scrollable process tree with full details.
If you want a visual representation of the parent/child relationships between processes, this is one easy way to do it. It's useful in debugging collections of shell scripts, because it provides something like a call traceback. When a shell script breaks, just remember "awwfux".

generate random password (works on Mac OS X)
Prepending env LC_CTYPE=C fixes a problem with bad bytes in /dev/urandom on Mac OS X

Replaces a color in a PDF document, useful for removing a dark background before printing.
The pdf is first converted to a bitmap, so change "-density" to match your printer resolution. Also be careful about the RAM required. In this example rgb(0,0,0) is replaced by rgb(255,255,255), change to suit your needs.

list files recursively by size

find all writable (by user) files in a directory tree (use 4 for readable, 1 for executable)

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.


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