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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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Clear your history saved into .bash_history file!
clears the history

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Press ctrl+r in a bash shell and type a few letters of a previous command
In the sample output, I pressed ctrl+r and typed the letters las. I can't imagine how much typing this has saved me.

Count all conections estabilished on gateway

Schedule a script or command in x num hours, silently run in the background even if logged out
This is helpful for shell scripts, I use it in my custom php install script to schedule to delete the build files in 3 hours, as the php install script is completely automated and is made to run slow. Does require at, which some environments without crontab still do have. You can add as many commands to the at you want. Here's how I delete them in case the script gets killed. (trapped) atq |awk '{print $1}'|xargs -iJ atrm J &>/dev/null

tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

Create an SSH SOCKS proxy server on localhost:8000 that will re-start itself if something breaks the connection temporarily
This command will log you into somehost via SSH and then go into the background (-f). From there, you can point e.g. firefox at localhost:8000 as a SOCKS proxy. Autossh will use port 20000 and 20001 to send and receive test data on those ports to ensure the SSH tunnel is still running, and will try to re-start the tunnel if it goes down. Make sure you have ssh-agent running, or passwordless ssh keys distributed between the two hosts.

convert doc to pdf
convert to pdf and many other formats and vise versa to get a list of supported formats, run $ unoconv --show

Backup files incremental with rsync to a NTFS-Partition
This will backup the _contents_ of /media/SOURCE to /media/TARGET where TARGET is formatted with ntfs. The --modify-window lets rsync ignore the less accurate timestamps of NTFS.

Email yourself after a job is done
This is a two part command that comes in really handy if you're running commands that take longer than you're willing to wait. The commands are separated by the semicolon(;) The first command is whatever you're attempting to do. The second commands emails you after the job completes.


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