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List your largest installed packages (on Debian/Ubuntu)

speedtest
alias speedtest='wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip'

sort a JSON blob
For situations where you keep JSON in a VCS and you want your diffs to be sane, such as within a Chef configuration repo.

Search Google

Clean up poorly named TV shows.
Replace 'SHOWNAME' with the name of the TV show. Add -n to test the command without renaming files. Check the 'sample output'.

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word passphrase (fast)
This restricts things 3 ways: 1. No capitalized words, hence no proper names. 2. No apostrophes. 3. Restricts size to range (3,7)

pinky - user info
Gives information about user's home directory and real name and shell user is having.

Run a ext4 file system check and badblocks scan with progress info
Nothing fancy, just a regular filesystem scan that calls the badblocks program and shows some progress info. The used options are: -c ? check for bad sectors with badblocks program -D ? optimize directories if possible -f ? force check, even if filesystem seems clean -t ? print timing stats (use -tt for more) -y ? assume answer ?yes? to all questions -C 0 ? print progress info to stdout /dev/sdxx ? the partition to check, (e.g. /dev/sda1 for first partition on first hard disk) NOTE: Never run fsck on a mounted partition!

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


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