Commands by curiousstranger (3)

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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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Easy and fast access to often executed commands that are very long and complex.
When using reverse-i-search you have to type some part of the command that you want to retrieve. However, if the command is very complex it might be difficult to recall the parts that will uniquely identify this command. Using the above trick it's possible to label your commands and access them easily by pressing ^R and typing the label (should be short and descriptive). UPDATE: One might suggest using aliases. But in that case it would be difficult to change some parts of the command (such as options, file/directory names, etc).

Which .service related this file?
I use this as an alias to get all .service files related a single installed file/conf (if it has services, of course). For rpm based systems ;)

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

Make a statistic about the lines of code
use find to grep all .c files from the target directory, cat them into one stream, then piped to wc to count the lines

Show all available colors on your terminal.
Using perl and tput, show all the colors with numbers that your actual $TERM can handle. If want to remove the numbers at beginning of new line, it should be something like this: $perl -E 'say `tput setb $_`," "x `tput cols`, `tput sgr0` for 0 .. (`tput colors` - 1)'

Search for a word in less
Although less behaves more or less like vim in certain aspects, the vim regex for word boundaries (\< and \>) do not work in less. Instead, use \b to denote a word boundary. Therefore, if you want to search for, say, the word "exit", but do not want to search for exiting, exits, etc., then surround "exit" with \b. This is useful if you need to search for specific occurrences of a keyword or command. \b can also be used at just the beginning and end, if needed.

List of commands you use most often

Find the package that installed a command

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