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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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Find the package that installed a command

execute your commands and avoid history records
$ secret_command;export HISTCONTROL= This will make "secret_command" not appear in "history" list.

Re-emerge all ebuilds with missing files (Gentoo Linux)
Revised approach to and3k's version, using pipes and read rather than command substitution. This does not require fiddling with IFS when paths have whitespace, and does not risk hitting command-line size limits. It's less verbose on the missing files, but it stops iterating at the first file that's missing, so it should be definitely faster. I expanded all the qlist options to be more self-describing.

Create an audio test CD of sine waves from 1 to 99 Hz
This command creates and burns a gapless audio CD with 99 tracks. Each track is a 30 second sine wave, the first is 1 Hz, the second 2 Hz, and so on, up to 99 Hz. This is useful for testing audio systems (how low can your bass go?) and for creating the constant vibrations needed to make non-Newtonian fluids (like cornstarch and water) crawl around. Note, this temporarily creates 500MB of .cdda files in the current directory. If you don't use the "rm" at the end of the command, you can burn more disks using $ cdrdao write cdrdao.toc Prerequisites: a blank CD-R in /dev/cdrw, sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/), and cdrdao (http://cdrdao.sourceforge.net/). I'm also assuming a recent version of bash for the brace expansion (which just looks nicer than using seq(1), but isn't necessary).

tcpdump sniff pop3,imap,smtp and http

Save an HTML page, and covert it to a .pdf file
Uses htmldoc to perform the conversion

Command line calculator

disassemble binary shellcode
The options -b binary and -m are needed for disassembling raw machine code when it is not part of a full binary executable with proper headers.

Perl oneliner to print access rights in octal format
This prints file access rights in octal - useful when "stat" is unavailable.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.


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