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Convert a MOV captured from a digital camera to a smaller AVI
Convert those .mov files that your digital camera makes to .avi Adjust the bitrate (-b) to get the appropriate file size. A larger bitrate produces a larger (higher quality) .avi file and smaller bitrate produces a smaller (lower quality) .avi file. Requires ffmpeg (see man page for details) (tested with canon camera MOV files) Other examples: $ffmpeg -i input.mov -sameq -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi $ffmpeg -i input.mov -b 1024k -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi

Resets a terminal that has been messed up by binary input

ring the bell

Search through files, ignoring .svn
By putting the "-not \( -name .svn -prune \)" in the very front of the "find" command, you eliminate the .svn directories in your find command itself. No need to grep them out. You can even create an alias for this command: $ alias svn_find="find . -not \( -name .svn -prune \)" Now you can do things like $ svn_find -mtime -3

Substrings a variable
substrings a variable starting at position. If no offset given prints rest of the line

Dump and bz2compress a mysql db
To also move the db backup to another location you could pass the output to the dd command instead of a file $mysqldump -u user -h host -ppwd -B dbname | bzip2 -zc9 | dd ssh usr@server "dd of=db_dump"

convert ascii string to hex
Even adds a newline.

Quick access to the ascii table.

Check if network cable is plugged in and working correctly
with 'mii-tool -w eth0' you can watch the interface for changes of the link status

Execute a command with a timeout
A timeout is great, but what if the command is taking longer than expected because it's hung up or ran into some other problem? That's where the -k option comes in. Run "some_command" and timeout after 30s. If the command is still running after 1 minute, it will receive a kill signal.


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