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Dump android contacts, sms
Crude, but works. Note for security, /data/ will be inaccessible unless your device has been *rooted*. On the other hand, if a device has been rooted, its data is now wide open to anyone with a USB cable and the above "one-liner". `adb` is one of the platform tools in the android SDK. To get SMS messages: $ adb pull /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases/mmssms.db ; sqlite3 -batch

Move all files between to date
In a folder with many files and folders, you want to move all files where the date is >= the file olderFilesNameToMove and

'hpc' in the box - starts a maximum of n compute commands modulo n controlled in parallel
the block of the loop is useful whenever you have huge junks of similar jobs, e.g., convert high res images to thumbnails, and make usage out of all the SMP power on your compute box without flooding the system. note: c is used as counter and the random sleep $ r=`echo $RANDOM%5 |bc`; echo "sleep $r"; sleep $r is just used as a dummy command.

Search big files with long lines
This is a handy way to circumvent the "Maximum line length of 2048 exceeded" grep error. Once you have run the above command (or put it in your .bashrc), files can be searched using: $ lgrep search-string /file/to/search

List your largest installed packages.
Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the $ | sort -rn which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;)

Change string in many files at once and more.
Find all files that contain string XXX in them, change the string from XXX to YYY, make a backup copy of the file and save a list of files changed in /tmp/fileschanged.

Remote copy directories and files through an SSH tunnel host
If you have lots of remote hosts sitting "behind" an ssh proxy host, then there is a special-case use of "rsynch" that allows one to easily copy directories and files across the ssh proxy host, without having to do two explicit copies: the '-e' option allows for a replacement "rsh" command. We use this option to specify an "ssh" tunnel command, with the '-A' option that causes authentication agent requests to be forwarded back to the local host. If you have ssh set up correctly, the above command can be done without any passwords being entered.

Convert decimal numbers to binary
Convert some decimal numbers to binary numbers. You could also build a general base-converter: $ function convBase { echo "ibase=$1; obase=$2; $3" | bc; } then you could write $ function decToBun { convBase 10 2 $1; }

Generate password

Download all images from a site
This recursively downloads all images from a given website to your /tmp directory. The -nH and -nd switches disable downloading of the directory structure.


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