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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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Scan a document to PDF
Adjust the --resolution and --mode as required (if these options are available for your scanner). The size options (-x, -y, -imageheight, -imagewidth) are for US letter paper. For A4, I think the command would be: $scanimage -p --resolution 250 --mode Gray -x 210 -y 297 | pnmtops -imageheight 11.7 -imagewidth 8.3 | ps2pdf - output.pdf

Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code
I have a bash alias for this command line and find it useful for searching C code for error messages. The -H tells grep to print the filename. you can omit the -i to match the case exactly or keep the -i for case-insensitive matching. This find command find all .c and .h files

Second pass dvd rip... The set of commands was too long, so I had to separate them into two.
This set of commands will rip a dvd title using a 2 pass mencoder xvid encode. It will provide a great quality rip. It will rip as close to 700MB as possible. (note the bitrate of -700000) Enjoy!

Port Knocking!
Knock on ports to open a port to a service (ssh for example) and knock again to close the port. You have to install knockd. See example config file below. [options] logfile = /var/log/knockd.log [openSSH] sequence = 3000,4000,5000 seq_timeout = 5 command = /sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -s %IP% -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT tcpflags = syn [closeSSH] sequence = 5000,4000,3000 seq_timeout = 5 command = /sbin/iptables -D INPUT -i eth0 -s %IP% -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT tcpflags = syn

See system users

Kill processes that have been running for more than a week

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

for newbies, how to get one line info about all /bin programs
Get simple description on each file from /bin dir, in list form, usefull for newbies.

list files with last modified at the end

Count files beneath current directory (including subfolders)


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