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Encode a file to MPEG4 format
Encode video.avi into newvideo.avi using the libav codec to produce an MPEG4 file with a bitrate of 800

Listing only one repository with yum
How to list just one repo with yum. First I disable all repo, second I enable just the repo that I want to list.

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

Sort contents of a directory with human readable output
Show sizes of all files and directories in a directory in size order. $du -hs * | sort -hr for reverse order. Taken from http://serverfault.com/questions/62411/how-can-i-sort-du-h-output-by-size

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

Use /dev/full to test language I/O-failsafety
The Linux /dev/full file simulates a "disk full" condition, and can be used to verify how a program handles this situation. In particular, several programming language implementations do not print error diagnostics (nor exit with error status) when I/O errors like this occur, unless the programmer has taken additional steps. That is, simple code in these languages does not fail safely. In addition to Perl, C, C++, Tcl, and Lua (for some functions) also appear not to fail safely.

Copy something to multiple SSH hosts with a Bash loop
Just a quick and simple one to demonstrate Bash For loop. Copies 'file' to multiple ssh hosts.

Take a screenshot of the window the user clicks on and name the file the same as the window title
In general, this is actually not better than the "scrot -d4" command I'm listing it as an alternative to, so please don't vote it down for that. I'm adding this command because xwd (X window dumper) comes with X11, so it is already installed on your machine, whereas scrot probably is not. I've found xwd handy on boxen that I don't want to (or am not allowed to) install packages on. NOTE: The dd junk for renaming the file is completely optional. I just did that for fun and because it's interesting that xwd embeds the window title in its metadata. I probably should have just parsed the output from file(1) instead of cutting it out with dd(1), but this was more fun and less error prone. NOTE2: Many programs don't know what to do with an xwd format image file. You can convert it to something normal using NetPBM's xwdtopnm(1) or ImageMagick's convert(1). For example, this would work: "xwd | convert fd:0 foo.jpg". Of course, if you have ImageMagick already installed, you'd probably use import(1) instead of xwd. NOTE3: Xwd files can be viewed using the X Window UnDumper: "xwud <foo.xwd". ImageMagick and The GIMP can also read .xwd files. Strangely, eog(1) cannot. NOTE4: The sleep is not strictly necessary, I put it in there so that one has time to raise the window above any others before clicking on it.

ssh: change directory while connecting
Useful to create an alias that sends you right in the directory you want : alias server-etc="ssh -t server 'cd /etc && $SHELL'"

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


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