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

Do one ping to a URL, I use this in a MRTG gauge graph to monitor connectivity

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

faster version of ls *
I know its not much but is very useful in time consuming scripts (cron, rc.d, etc).

Delete Mailer-Daemon messages

Get File Names from touch commands
retrieve file names back from touch commands for them

Find the package that installed a command

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.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

command line fu roulette
retrieves the html from a random command line fu page, then finds commands on the page and prints them alternatively, pipe to bash (add "| bash" to the end) to execute the command (very risky) edit: had to adjust to properly display the portion that replaces HTML characters (e.g. " -> ")


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