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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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Erase to factory a pendrive, disk or memory card, and watch the progress

Dump android contacts, sms
Crude, but works. Note for security, /data/ will be inaccessible unless your device has been *rooted*. On the other hand, if a device has been rooted, its data is now wide open to anyone with a USB cable and the above "one-liner". `adb` is one of the platform tools in the android SDK. To get SMS messages: $ adb pull /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db ; sqlite3 -batch

Find the package that installed a command

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

View the newest xkcd comic.
This function displays the latest comic from xkcd.com. One of the best things about xkcd is the title text when you hover over the comic, so this function also displays that after you close the comic. To get a random xkcd comic, I also use the following: $xkcdrandom(){ wget -qO- dynamic.xkcd.com/comic/random|tee >(feh $(grep -Po '(?

Compare a remote file with a local file
This method does not transfer the contents of the entire file, instead it computes a md5 sum of the file on each end so that large files can be compared without transferring them across the net.

Search commandlinefu.com from the command line using the API
Usage: cmdfu hello world

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"

Display a Lissajous curve in text
Use Ruby's standard Curses module to display a Lissajous curve in the console. Replace the "0.2" with different numbers for different curves.

list files recursively by size


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