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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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git pull all repos

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

Assign top-level JSON entries to shell variables
A recursive version might be useful too. /dev/tty is used to show which shell variables just got defined.

renice by name

silent/shh - shorthand to make commands really quiet
Sometimes I just want to run a command quietly but all that keyboard shifting makes my fingers hurt. This little function does the job eg.: $ if shh type less; then PAGER=less; fi

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Reverse ssh
Both hosts must be running ssh and also the outside host must have a port forwarded to port 22.

AWK Calculator

Create arbitrary big file full of zeroes but done in a second
If you want to create fast a very big file for testing purposes and you do not care about its content, then you can use this command to create a file of arbitrary size within less than a second. Content of file will be all zero bytes. The trick is that the content is just not written to the disk, instead the space for it is somehow reserved on operating system level and file system level. It would be filled when first accessed/written (not sure about the mechanism that lies below, but it makes the file creation super fast). Instead of '1G' as in the example, you could use other modifiers like 200K for kilobytes (1024 bytes), 500M for megabytes (1024 * 1024 bytes), 20G for Gigabytes (1024*1024*1024 bytes), 30T for Terabytes (1024^4 bytes). Also P for Penta, etc... Command tested under Linux.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using QPDF
Remove security restrictions from PDF documents using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need QPDF installed (http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/) for this to work.


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