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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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Convert an image sequence into a video

Extract the MBR ID of a device
Useful when you want to know the mbrid of a device - for the purpose of making it bootable. Certain hybridiso distros, for eg the OpenSUSE live ISO uses the mbrid to find the live media. Use this command to find out the mbrid of your USB drive and then edit the /grub/mbrid file to match it.

sync svn working copy and remote repository (auto adding new files)
Lists the local files that are not present in the remote repository (lines beginning with ?) and add them.

Create a pdf version of a manpage
Quick and dirty version. I made a version that checks if a manpage exists (but it's not a oneliner). You must have ps2pdf and of course Ghostscript installed in your box. Enhancements appreciated :-)

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Schedule a script or command in x num hours, silently run in the background even if logged out
doesn't require "at", change the "2h" to whatever you want... (deafult unit for sleep is seconds)

Download last file from index of

Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

Lists unambigously names of all xml elements used in files in current directory
This set of commands was very convenient for me when I was preparing some xml files for typesetting a book. I wanted to check what styles I had to prepare but coudn't remember all tags that I used. This one saved me from error-prone browsing of all my files. It should be also useful if one tries to process xml files with xsl, when using own xml application.

Create full backups of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Problem: I wanted to backup user data individually. In this example, all user data is located in "/mnt/storage/profiles", and about 25 folders inside, each with a username ( /mnt/storage/profiles/mike; /mnt/storage/profiles/lucy ...) I need each individual folder backed up, not the whole "/mnt/storage/profiles". So, using find while excluding directories depth and creating two variables (tarfile=username & desdir=destination), tar will create a .tgz file for each folder, resulting in a "mike_full.tgz" and "lucy_full.tgz".


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