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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

Purge configuration files of removed packages on debian based systems
Purge all configuration files of removed packages

Find the package a command belongs to on debian-based distros
Advanced revision to the command 8776 . This revision follows symbolic links. The quotation-marks surrounding $(which $1) allows for graceful handling of errors ( ie. readlink does not complain incase 'which' command generates (null) output)

Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Generate Random Text based on Length
Random text of length "$1" without the useless cat command.

diff files while disregarding indentation and trailing white space
**NOTE** Tekhne's alternative is much more succinct and its output conforms to the files actual contents rather than with white space removed My command on the other hand uses bash process substitution (and "Minimal" Perl), instead of files, to first remove leading and trailing white space from lines, before diff'ing the streams. Very useful when differences in indentation, such as in programming source code files, may be irrelevant

Backup a remote database to your local filesystem
I have this on a daily cronjob to backup the commandlinefu.com database from NearlyFreeSpeech.net (awesome hosts by the way) to my local drive. Note that (on my Ubuntu system at least) you need to escape the % signs on the crontab.

interactive rss-based colorful commandline-fu reader perl oneliner (v0.1)
required packages: curl, xml2, html2text command is truncated, see 'sample output'

currently mounted filesystems in nice layout
Particularly useful if you're mounting different drives, using the following command will allow you to see all the filesystems currently mounted on your computer and their respective specs with the added benefit of nice formatting.


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