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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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comment current line(put # at the beginning)

Watch the progress of 'dd'
Running this code will execute dd in the background, and you'll grab the process ID with '$!' and assign it to the 'pid' variable. Now, you can watch the progress with the following: $ while true; do kill -USR1 $pid && sleep 1 && clear; done The important thing to grasp here isn't the filename or location of your input or output, or even the block size for that matter, but the fact that you can keep an eye on 'dd' as it's running to see where you are at during its execution.

Clone perms and owner group from one file to another
Copy both perms and owner group from one file to another.

Sort installed rpms by decreasing size.
It's all said in the title.

Copy data using gtar
It copies the entire current working directory to the destination directory with compression enabled.

Screenshot pipe to remote host, adding URL to clipboard, notifying when done. (without saving locally)
Requires you to have password free login to remote host ;) Requires xclip and notify-send (If you want to put into clipboard and be notified when action is completed). DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)-$(($(date +%N)/10000000)); HOST="ssh host of your choice"; DEST="destination folder without trailing slash"; URL="URL for file if uploaded to web enabled dir ie. http://$HOST/~user/screenshot_$DATE.png"; import -window root png:- | ssh $HOST "cat > $DEST/screenshot_$DATE.png"; echo $URL | xclip; notify-send -u low "Screenshot Taken" "Entire screen.\nCopied to clipboard"

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
Works on asterisk 1.8.

colored tail

Get your public ip using dyndns

How many files in the current directory ?
A simple "ls" lists files *and* directories. So we need to "find" the files (type 'f') only. As "find" is recursive by default we must restrict it to the current directory by adding a maximum depth of "1". If you should be using the "zsh" then you can use the dot (.) as a globbing qualifier to denote plain files: zsh> ls *(.) | wc -l for more info see the zsh's manual on expansion and substitution - "man zshexpn".


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