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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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Share your terminal session (remotely or whatever)
Force the user you want to watch doing things into doing his things in a screen session. Then simply attach yourself to that session with the command shown above. Works only if you are on the same machine, of course

create an screenshot, upload it to your server via scp and then open that screenshot in firefox
I often need to send screenshots to other people to explain settings and whatever. So I created this oneline which I use to create the screenshot with imagemagik, upload it via scp to my server and then the command opens an firefox tab with the screenshot. The screenshot can be a region or a window. You just have to replace the parts beginning with YOUR.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
Your platform may not have pv by default. If you are using Homebew on OSX, simply 'brew install pv'.

Display the tree of all instance of a particular process

Randomly run command
Randomly decide whether to run a command, or fail. It's useful for testing purposes. . Usage: ran PERCENTAGE COMMAND [ARGS] Note: In this version the percentage is required. . This is like @sesom42 and @snipertyler's commands but in a USABLE form. . e.g. In your complicated shell script, put "ran 99" before a crucial component. Now, it will fail 1% of the time allowing you to test the failure code-path. $ ran 99 my_complex_program arg1 arg2

Create .pdf from .doc
sudo apt-get install wv tetex-extra ghostscript

Dump snapshot of UFS2 filesystem, then gzip it
Opens a snapshot of a live UFS2 filesystem, runs dump to generate a full filesystem backup which is run through gzip. The filesystem must support snapshots and have a .snap directory in the filesystem root. To restore the backup, one can do $ zcat /path/to/adXsYz.dump.gz | restore -rf -

chmod - change file permissions of a file to be similar of another

Find out current working directory of a process
This is an alternative to another command using two xargs. If it's a command you know there's only one of, you can just use: $ ls -l /proc/$(pgrep COMMAND)/cwd

Vlc ncurses mode browsing local directorys.


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