Commands by erdeszt (1)

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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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Start vim without initialization
This will skip all initializations. Especially useful when your ~/.vimrc has something wrong.

Compose 2 images to 1
Compose 2 images (foreground.jpg with background.jpg) into 1 (image.jpg), the numeric parameters stablish the size of the foreground.jpg image (96x96) and the position x,y (+250+70) relative to the background.jpg image. Images can be any format, jpg, png, bmp, etc...

Use bash history with process substitution
Bash has a great history system of its commands accessed by the ! built-in history expansion operator (documented elsewhere on this site or on the web). You can combine the ! operator inside the process redirection

execute a command in case of success or execute a command in case of failure

Create POSIX tar archive
tar(1) and cpio(1) are not fully platform agnostic, although their file formats are specified in POSIX.1-2001. As such, GNU tar(1) might not be able to extract a BSD tar(1) archive, and ivce versa. pax(1) is defined in POSIX.1-2001. To extract an archive: $ pax -rf archive.tar

tar and bz2 a set of folders as individual files
This version will work if "*screenflow" returns any results with weird characters, and will actually compress the tarballs.

Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.

Quick notepad
Quick write some notes to a file with cat. Ctrl+C when you have finish.

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
This handles when you have a single call or channel. Other commands will strip out the result if there is a single channel or call active because the output changes the noun to be singular instead of plural.

Simplest way to get size (in bytes) of a file


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