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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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exclude a column with cut
Show all columns except 5th. This might help you save some typing if you are trying to exclude some columns from the output.

restart apache only if config works
making lots of configurations to apache and restarting the server only to find it broken just plain sucks.

Get all ip address for the host

Enable cd by variable names
Usage: $ mydir=/very/long/path/to/a/dir $ cd mydir I often need to cd where no man wants to go (i.e. long path). by enabling the shell option cdable_vars, I can tell cd to assume the destination is the name of a variable.

List the size of all sub folders and files from the current location, with sorting

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Discovering all open files/dirs underneath a directory
It may be helpful in case you need to umount a directory and some process is preventing you to do so keeping the folder busy. The lsof may process the +D option slowly and may require a significant amount of memory because it will descend the full dir tree. On the other hand it will neither follow symlinks nor other file systems.

Preserve user variables when running commands with sudo.
In this case the current user has proxy variable set which allows access to the rpm on the internet but needs root privs to install it. Running sudo -E preserves the current user proxy var and allows the rpm install to be executed with sudo.

Extract a IRC like chat log out of an Adium xml logfile


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