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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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convert from decimal to hexadecimal
Use the standard calculator bc to convert decimals to hex

get the oldest file in a directory
reverse the sorting of ls to get the newest file: $ls -1tr --group-directories-first /path/to/dir/ | tail -n 1 Problems: If there are no files in the directory you will get a directory or nothing.

32 bits or 64 bits?

Display current time in requested time zones.
The time zone names come from the tz database which is usually found at /usr/share/zoneinfo.

Piping Microphone Audio Over Netcat
Send microphone audio to another computer using netcat and arecord. Connect to the stream using "nc [other ip] 3333|aplay" You can set up two-way communication by piping audio the reverse direction on another port: Machine #1: $arecord -D hw:0,0 -f S16_LE -c2|nc -l 3333 &;nc -l 3334|aplay Machine #2: $$ip=[machine1_ip];arecord -D hw:0,0 -f S16_LE -c2|nc $ip 3334 &;nc $ip 3333|aplay

Get all upgradable deb packages in a single line
Works for debian and ubuntu based distros.

resize all JPG images in folder and create new images (w/o overwriting)
Convert all jpegs in the current directory into ~1024*768 pixels and ~ 150 KBytes jpegs

list files recursively by size

format txt as table

Watch the progress of 'dd'
The 'dd' command doesn't provide a progress when writing data. So, sending the "USR1" signal to the process will spit out its progress as it writes data. This command is superior to others on the site, as it doesn't require you to previously know the PID of the dd command.


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