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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 the package that installed a command

Copy input sent to a command to stderr
In the above example 'muspi merol' (the output of the first rev command) is sent to stderr and 'lorem ipsum' (the output of the second rev command) is sent to stdout. rev reverse lines of a file or files. This use of tee allows testing if a program correctly handles its input without using files that hold the data.

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

list files recursively by size

Find the location of the currently loaded php.ini file
Quick and easy way to find out which php.ini file is being used. Especially useful if you just need to find the location of the file for editing purposes.

See system users

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"

shell function to underline a given string.
underline() will print $1, followed by a series of '=' characters the width of $1. An optional second argument can be used to replace '=' with a given character. This function is useful for breaking lots of data emitted in a for loop into sections which are easier to parse visually. Let's say that 'xxxx' is a very common pattern occurring in a group of CSV files. You could run $ grep xxxx *.csv This would print the name of each csv file before each matching line, but the output would be hard to parse visually. $ for i in *.csv; do printf "\n"; underline $i; grep "xxxx" $i; done Will break the output into sections separated by the name of the file, underlined.

colored prompt
It colors the machine name and current directory different colors for easy viewing.

Prints a file leaving out all blank lines and comment-only lines
Does not print any line that either: - is empty - contains only spaces or tabs - starts with # - starts with spaces/tabs followed by a #


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