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

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

List files older than one year, exluding those in the .snapshot directory
Useful when you want to cron a daily deletion task in order to keep files not older than one year. The command excludes .snapshot directory to prevent backup deletion. One can append -delete to this command to delete the files : $ find /path/to/directory -not \( -name .snapshot -prune \) -type f -mtime +365 -delete

Backup of a partition
Clone a partion with tar.

Function to output an ASCII character given its decimal equivalent

Should I be sleeping?

Watch movies in your terminal
requires mplayer

calculate in commandline with bash
Only works for integer arithmetic.

Extract a remote tarball in the current directory without having to save it locally

shell function to underline a given string.
underline() will print $1, followed by a series of '=' characters the width of $1. An optional second argument can be used to replace '=' with a given character. This function is useful for breaking lots of data emitted in a for loop into sections which are easier to parse visually. Let's say that 'xxxx' is a very common pattern occurring in a group of CSV files. You could run $ grep xxxx *.csv This would print the name of each csv file before each matching line, but the output would be hard to parse visually. $ for i in *.csv; do printf "\n"; underline $i; grep "xxxx" $i; done Will break the output into sections separated by the name of the file, underlined.


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