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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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Show total size of each subdirectory, broken down by KB,MB,GB,TB

Boot another OS at next startup

scan multiple log subdirectories for the latest log files and tail them

Mount a VMware virtual disk (.vmdk) file on a Linux box
This does not require you to know the partition offset, kpartx will find all partitions in the image and create loopback devices for them automatically. This works for all types of images (dd of hard drives, img, etc) not just vmkd. You can also activate LVM volumes in the image by running $vgchange -a y and then you can mount the LV inside the image. To unmount the image, umount the partition/LV, deactivate the VG for the image $vgchange -a n then run $kpartx -dv to remove the partition mappings.

Count Files in a Directory with Wildcards.
Remove the '-maxdepth 1' option if you want to count in directories as well

Monitor RX/TX packets and any subsquent errors
www.fir3net.com

Search some text from all files inside a directory

Help shell find freshly installed applications (re: PATH)
Immediately after installing things into your PATH (e.g. under /usr/bin), currently open shells cannot find them ("zsh: command not found"). Use rehash to get the shell to rescan available executables.

A simple X11 tea timer
wrapping the snippet in $( )& puts the whole thing in the background so you don't tie up your login session.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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