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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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Skip to next selection in playlist
Uses process signal to play next selection

Simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data
Sometimes you need a simple server which listens on a port and prints out received data. Example: Consider you want to know, which data is posted by a homepage to a remote script without analysing the html code! A simple way to do this is to save the page to your computer, substitude all action="address" with action="localhost:portnumber", run 'ncat -l portnumber' and open the edited page with your browser. If you then submit the form, ncat will print out the http-protocol with all the posted data.

Edit a file on a remote host using vim

Decode base64-encoded file in one line of Perl
Another option is openssl.

Pretty Print a simple csv in the command line
Splits the input based on commas and prints it in a nice column format. This would not work for CSV rows that have "," between quotes or with newline characters. Use only simple simple csv files.

Send command to all terminals in a screen session

Copy the full path of a file to the clipboard (requires xclip or similar)
Handy for those times you need to paste a file path in an IDE or some other app. sudo apt-get install xclip Then, for convenience, alias xclip to 'xclip -selection c' so you can just do something like realpath . | xclip

Have your sound card call out elapsed time.
Useful contexts : You are doing yoga or some other physical training in which you are holding a position. Or you practice the pomodoro productivity technique. Or your girlfriend said "We're leaving in 40 minutes". Design details: sleep executes before espeak to give you a 5 seconds head start. espeak is run in the background so it doesn't mess up the timing.

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word passphrase (fast)
Some snippets posted are slow on big dictionaries, this one is fast.

Find wich ports you probably want to open in your firewall on a fresh installed machine


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