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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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Colorful man
That command installs "most" and make this command as the default man reader. The "most" works like "less" (the current man reader), but it render colors for manpages and may do more things. Read "man most". You can see a preview here: http://www.dicas-l.com.br/dicas-l/20090718.php

Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: $ curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '' '{for (i=2; i

Search some text from all files inside a directory

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"

Get File Names from touch commands
retrieve file names back from touch commands for them

Beep siren
Infinitely plays beeps with sinusoidally changing sound frequency. Ideal for alarm on an event.

List files older than one year, exluding those in the .snapshot directory
Useful when you want to cron a daily deletion task in order to keep files not older than one year. The command excludes .snapshot directory to prevent backup deletion. One can append -delete to this command to delete the files : $ find /path/to/directory -not \( -name .snapshot -prune \) -type f -mtime +365 -delete

reduce mp3 bitrate (and size, of course)
Useful if you have to put some mp3 files into mobile devices (ie mobile phones with no much memory)

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"

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@site.com "cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
You'll want to use this for passwordless logins. Same as ssh-copy-id, if you don't have it on your system.


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