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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 usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
Show active calls as the happen on an Asterisk server. Note that the Asterisk command (in single quotes) is formatted for Asterisk 1.6. Use the -n flag on the watch command to modify the refresh period (in seconds - default is 2 seconds).

Find the package that installed a command

Random colours at random locations

Force the script to be started as root
Will run the script as root and exit if the wrong or no password is given. Also will keep the parameters active if any where given.

Replace php short open tags
Tired of front end developers using short open tags in your views? This will replace all instances of

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" }

Make sure your script runs with a minimum Bash version
If you use new features of a certain Bash version in your shell script, make sure that it actually runs with the required version.

Find today created files

Get My Public IP Address


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