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What is the best command line you use or you have ever seen in Unix/Linux shell ?

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community wiki material? – jldupont Oct 29 at 12:55
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How is this programming related? – Filip Ekberg Oct 29 at 12:57
cowsay, anyway. – litb Oct 29 at 13:00
Oh great, another "best something you use" question. – Gnoupi Oct 29 at 13:37

migrated from stackoverflow.com Oct 29 at 13:55

closed as not a real question by Diago♦ Oct 29 at 13:55
It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.

8 Answers

vote up 6 vote down

wine; talk; touch; unzip; touch; strip; gasp; mount; fsck; more; yes; fsck; more; yes; fsck; gasp; unmount;

Stolen off the net, but still good ;)

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Well, if we go by usage, mine would have to be ls. Kinda hard to accomplish anything if I can't see what I'm working on.

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locate is quite usefull

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I like sl from the sl package.

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kill -9 -1 beats everything...

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at least this one doesn't have permanent damage.... – Dani Oct 29 at 13:01
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Another one not to run without care:

:(){:|:};:

But seriously, the cut, join, sort and uniq commands are all very useful for manipulating text files. For example, you can find all the files that exist in fileA, but not in fileB by

sort fileA fileB fileB | uniq -u
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vote up 1 vote down

When a software RAID is being built or resynced, I like this command:

watch 'cat /proc/mdstat'

I am amused by how well it simulates something more sophisticated like top.

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I've always been a fan of

rm -rf /

Warning: This command will recursively erase files starting from the root folder. Think more than twice before using it.

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me too... lol :-) – jldupont Oct 29 at 12:55
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to be fair to newbies: don't try this! It will wipe out your filesystem! – jldupont Oct 29 at 12:57
That would be more like the worst one. – Dan Moulding Oct 29 at 12:58
nice but dangerous one, i remember one day someone asked a question on IRC, and an another one said: try rm -rf / and reboot the noob said thank you , but we had never seen him on the channel big LOL – Nadir SOUALEM Oct 29 at 12:58
btw, i voted the above comment up two times xD – litb Oct 29 at 13:06
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