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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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Change timestamp on a file
-a for access time, -m for modification time, -c do not create any files, -t timestamp

What is my public IP-address?
Short command, easy to remember

Sort a character string
Sorts a character string, using common shell commands.

shows history of logins on the server
perfect on a crashed system where you can't use commands like last. for investigation purposes wtmp file can be copied over to a different server and read with utmpdump

Connect to remote machine with other enconding charset

Create a new file

converting horizontal line to vertical line

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Backup a remote database to your local filesystem
I have this on a daily cronjob to backup the commandlinefu.com database from NearlyFreeSpeech.net (awesome hosts by the way) to my local drive. Note that (on my Ubuntu system at least) you need to escape the % signs on the crontab.

Reset hosed terminal,
stty sane resets the tty to basic usable function. The ^J is a newline -- sometimes CR/LF interpretation is broken so use the ^J explicitly.


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