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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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Sum columns from CSV column $COL

Execute a command with a timeout
A timeout is great, but what if the command is taking longer than expected because it's hung up or ran into some other problem? That's where the -k option comes in. Run "some_command" and timeout after 30s. If the command is still running after 1 minute, it will receive a kill signal.

Scan your LAN for unauthorized IPs
populate the auth.hosts file with a list of IP addresses that are authorized to be in use and when you run this command it will return the addresses that are pingable and not in the authorized list. Can be combined with the "Command line Twitter" command to tweet unauthorized access.

List your sudo rights
List the commands you have the right to use with sudo.

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
1 = on ac, 0 = on bat

Vectorize xkcd strips
Uses ImageMagick and potrace to vectorize the input image, with parameters optimized for xkcd-like pictures.

Have netcat listening on your ports and use telnet to test connection
This will start a netcat process listening on port 666. If you are able connect to your your server, netcat will receive the data being sent and spit it out to the screen (it may look like random garbage, so you might want to redirect it to a file).

Recursively remove .svn directories from the current location

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

Converts all pngs in a folder to webp using all available cores
As an alternative to the above command, this one ditches the unnecessary and complicated for loop in favor of a way faster multi-core approach for a task that's more CPU than I/O intensive, making it a perfect suite for GNU parallel


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