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invoke MATLAB functions from command line
`-r script.m` also possible

find with high precission (nanoseconds 1/1,000,000,000s) the last changed file.
this is good for variables if you have many script created files and if you want to know which one is the last created/changed one..

dd if=/dev/null of=/dev/sda
removes all files/filesystems of a harddisk. It removes EVERYTHING of your hard disk. Be carefull when to select a device. It does not prompt for and second check.

Rename files in batch

See why a program can't seem to access a file
Sometimes a program refuses to read a file and you're not sure why. You may have display_errors turned off for PHP or something. In this example, fopen('/var/www/test/foo.txt') was called but doesn't have read access to foo.txt. Strace can tell you what went wrong. E.g., if php doesn't have read access to the file, strace will say "EACCESS (Permission denied)". Or, if the file path you gave doesn't exist, strace will say "ENOENT (No such file or directory)", etc. This works for any program you can run from the command-line, e.g., strace python myapp.py -e open,access... Note: the above command uses php-cli, not mod_php, which is a different SAPI with diff configs, etc.

Blacklist usb storage
Some times you may ban usb to protect thefting of your personal data. Blacklist the usb_storage module by adding blacklist usb_storage to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. To load the module manually, $sudo modprobe usb_storage.

Recursively search and replace old with new string, inside every instance of filename.ext
This is a slightly modified version of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4283/recursive-search-and-replace-old-with-new-string-inside-files (which did not work due to incorrect syntax) with the added option to sed inside only files named filename.ext

'micro' ps aux (by mem/cpu)
mac os x: ps aux | awk '{print($1" "$3" "$4" "$11);}' | grep -v "0,0" linux: ps aux | awk '{print($1" "$3" "$4" "$11);}' | grep -v "0.0"

One-liner to generate Self-Signed SSL Certificate+Key without any annoying prompts or CSRs
Handy if you want to quickly generate a self-signed certificate. Also can be used in your automated scripts for generating quick-use certificates.

A command line calculator in Perl
Once I wrote a command line calculator program in C, then I found this... and added to it a bit. For ease of use I normally use this in a tiny Perl program (which I call pc for 'Perl Calculator') #!/usr/bin/perl -w die "Usage: $0 MATHS\n" unless(@ARGV);for(@ARGV){s/x/*/g;s/v/sqrt /g;s/\^/**/g}; print eval(join('',@ARGV)),$/; It handles square roots, power, modulus: $ pc 1+2 (1 plus 2) 3 $ pc 3x4 (3 times 4) 12 $ pc 5^6 (5 to the power of 6) 15625 $ pc v 49 ( square root of 49 ) 7 $ pc 12/3 (12 divided by 3) 4 $ pc 19%4 (19 modulus 4) 3 (you can string maths together too) $ pc 10 x 10 x 10 1000 $ pc 10 + 10 + 10 / 2 25 $ pc 7 x v49 49


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