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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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Generate a quick, lengthy password

add static arp entry to default gateway, arp poison protection

pimp text output e.g. "Linux rocks!" to look nice

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
Sends SIGINFO to the process. This is a BSD feature OS X inherited. You must have the terminal window executing dd selected when entering CTRL + T for this to work.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Locate config files of the program
Locate config files of the program. May not be used for interactive programs like vim.

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
This shell function displays a list of binaries contained in an installed package; works on Debian based Linux distributions.


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