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Fast command-line directory browsing
Not really alternative, just giving a different behavior listing current directory if no directory given.

convert a .wmv to a .avi

Quick way to sum every numbers in a file written line by line
If you have a file full of numbers written line by line, you can sum every line to get the total. With a file like this: 3443535 9878977 67554 987798 232324 you will got: 14610188

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.

Assign top-level JSON entries to shell variables
A recursive version might be useful too. /dev/tty is used to show which shell variables just got defined.

Force unmount occupied partition
Alternative if "Lazy unmount" (umount -l) doesn't obey. Alternative for NFS: $ umount -f /media/sdb1 Use with caution: forcing to unmount a busy partition can cause data loss!

Convert GoogleCL gmail contacts to cone adress book
Full Command: $ google contacts list name,name,email|perl -pne 's%^((?!N\/A)(.+?)),((?!N\/A)(.+?)),([a-z0-9\._-]+\@([a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]\.)+([a-z]+\.)?([a-z]+))%${1}:${3} %imx'|grep -oP '^((?!N\/A)(.+?)) ' | sort You'll need googlecl and python-gdata. First setup google cl via: $ google Then give your PC access $ google contacts list name,email Then do the command, save it or use this one to dump it in the cone-address.txt file in your home dir: $ google contacts list name,name,email | perl -p -n -e 's%^((?!N\/A)(.+?)),((?!N\/A)(.+?)),([a-z0-9\._-]+\@([a-z0-9][a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]\.)+([a-z]+\.)?([a-z]+))%${1}:${3} %imx' | grep -o -P '^((?!N\/A)(.+?)) ' | sort > ~/cone-adress.txt Then import into cone. It filters out multiple emails, and contacts with no email that have N/A. (Picasa photo persons without email for example...)

Rename many files in directories and subdirectories
This is probably overkill, but I have some issues when the directories have spaces in their names. The $ find . -type d -print0 | while read -d $'\0' dir; do xxx; done loops over all the subdirectories in this place, ignoring the white spaces (to some extend). $ cd "$dir"; echo " process $dir"; cd -; goes to the directory and back. It also prints some info to check the progress. $ find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.ogg.mp3" -exec rename 's/.ogg.mp3/.mp3/' {} \; renames the file within the current directory. The whole should work with directories and file names that include white spaces.

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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