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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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Open a manpage in the default (graphical) web browser
An easy alias for opening a manpage, nicely HTML formatted, in your set internet browser. If you get a "command exited with status 3" error you need to install groff.

Generat a Random MAC address
Original author unknown (I believe off of a wifi hacking forum). Used in conjuction with ifconfig and cron.. can be handy (especially spoofing AP's)

random xkcd comic
i sorta stole this from http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=878#MTC_form but it didn't work, so here it is, fixed. --- updated to work with jpegs, and to use a fancy positive look behind assertion.

Copy structure
Copies a dir structure without the files in it.

Prettify an XML file
Like `tidy`, `xmllint` can be used to prettify XML files. The --nsclean option is also useful to remove redundant namespaces.

Port scan a range of hosts with Netcat.
Simple one-liner for scanning a range of hosts, you can also scan a range of ports with Netcat by ex.: nc -v -n -z -w 1 192.168.0.1 21-443 Useful when Nmap is not available:) Range declaration like X..X "for i in {21..29}" is only works with bash 3.0+

Unlock your KDE4 session remotely (for boxes locked by KDE lock utility)
Do the unlock KDE screen saver locked session with lightdm display manager used in Kubuntu 12.10 +

Convert .wma files to .ogg with ffmpeg

chroot, bind mount without root privilege/setup
PRoot is a user-space implementation of chroot, mount --bind, and binfmt_misc. This means that users don't need any privileges or setup to do things like using an arbitrary directory as the new root filesystem, making files accessible somewhere else in the filesystem hierarchy, or executing programs built for another CPU architecture transparently through QEMU user-mode. Also, developers can use PRoot as a generic Linux process instrumentation engine thanks to its extension mechanism, see CARE for an example. Technically PRoot relies on ptrace, an unprivileged system-call available in every Linux kernel. https://github.com/cedric-vincent/PRoot

Print a row of 50 hyphens
This feels more intuitive to me.


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