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get a fresh commandlinefu-item each day as motd
Commandline-fu often has little tricks that I always forget. By adding this to the root-cron (sudo crontab -e) I lean a new trick every day.

Output Windows services in a neatly formated list (cygwin)
Outputs Windows Services service name and display name using "sc query", pipes the output to "awk" for processing, then "column" for formatting. List All Services: $ sc query state= all | awk '/SERVICE_NAME/{printf"%s:",$2;getline;gsub(/DISP.*:\ /,"");printf"%s\n",$0}' | column -ts\: List Started Services: $sc query | awk '/SERVICE_NAME/{printf"%s:",$2;getline;gsub(/DISP.*:\ /,"");printf"%s\n",$0}' | column -ts\: List Stopped Services: $sc query state= inactive| awk '/SERVICE_NAME/{printf"%s:",$2;getline;gsub(/DISP.*:\ /,"");printf"%s\n",$0}' | column -ts\:

Concatenate (join) video files
Use mencoder to concatenate (join) multiple video files together.

'hpc' in the shell - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel, using make
this oneliner uses make and it's jobserver for parallel execution of your script. The '-j' flag for make defines number of subprocesses to launch, '-f' tells make use stdin instead of Makefile. Also make have neat flag '-l', which "Specifies that no new jobs (commands) should be started if there are others jobs running and the load is at least load (a floating-point number)." Also you can use plain Makefile, for better readability: targets = $(subst .png,.jpg,$(wildcard *.png)) $(targets): echo convert $(subst .jpg,.png,$@) $@ all : $(targets)

Mac osx friendly version of this terminal typing command at 200ms per key

Find dead symbolic links

Check variable has been set

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.

List the binaries installed by a Debian package
GNU grep's perl-compatible regular expression(PCRE).

Copy a file using dc3dd and watch its progress (very nice alternative to dd)
Requires the dc3dd package - available at http://dc3dd.sourceforge.net


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