Commands by ivan4th (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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Merge files, joining each line in one line

Change every instance of OLD to NEW in file FILE
Very quick way to change a word in a file. I use it all the time to change variable names in my PHP scripts (sed -i 's/$oldvar/$newvar/g' index.php)

Check syntax of all Perl modules or scripts underneath the current directory
Finds all *.p[ml]-files and runs a perl -c on them, checking whether Perl thinks they are syntactically correct

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

aptitude easter eggs
this is a reference to Antoine de St. Exupery's "The Little Prince"

Remind yourself to leave in 15 minutes
If you spend most of your time in front of the terminal, leave is a useful reminder. Leave can have absolute form: leave 1555 reminds you to leave at 3:55PM

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Creates a symbolic link or overwrites an existing one
-n: dereference the existing link -v: (optional) to be sure of what is being done -f: force the deletion of the existing one -s: creates a symlink Be careful: the destination can also be a file or a directory and it will be overwritten.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Create multiple subfolders in one command.
Instead of typing separate commands to create various subfolders, we can create multiple subfolders by listing them between brackets and separated by commas.

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