Felt like I need to win the lottery, and wrote this command so I train and develop my guessing abilities. Show Sample Output

Check general system error on AIX

I wanted to create a copy of my whole laptop disk on an lvm disk of the same size. First I created the logical volume: lvcreate -L120G -nlaptop mylvms SOURCE: dd if=/dev/sda bs=16065b | netcat ip-target 1234 TARGET: nc -l -p 1234 | dd of=/dev/mapper/mylvms-laptop bs=16065b to follow its process you issue the following command in a different terminal STATS: on target in a different terminal: watch -n60 -- kill -USR1 $(pgrep dd) (see http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4356/output-stats-from-a-running-dd-command-to-see-its-progress)

if you start a large dd and forgot about statistics, but you still wonder what the progress is this command in an OTHER terminal will show you the way. NOTE: the watch command by itself will not output anything NOTE: the kill command will not kill the process Show Sample Output

If you give tar a list of filenames, it will not add the directories, so if you don't care about directory ownership or permissions, you can save some space. Tar will create directories as necessary when extracting. This command is limited by the maximum supported size of the argument list, so if you are trying to tar up the whole OS for instance, you may just get "Argument list too long".

Tar - Compress by excluding folders Show Sample Output

This can show all ls colors, with a demo.

We force IPv4, compress the stream, specify the cypher stream to be Blowfish. I suppose you could use aes256-ctr as well for cypher spec. I'm of course leaving out things like master control sessions and such as that may not be available on your shell although that would speed things up as well.

Not everyone reads manpages. Aliasing this command will help with the task of doing audits with RKhunter. It will check for the latest version, update the definitions and then run a check on the system. Hint: alias that in your .bashrc to make life for your fingers easier.

This command is a great way to check to see if acpi is doing damage to your disks by agressivly parking the read arm and wearing down it's life. As you can see, mine has lost half its life. I'm sure this could be shortened though somehow. It will use smartctl to dump the stats and then grep out just the temperature and load cycles for the disk (a load cycle is when a the read arm comes out of park and wears on the drive). Show Sample Output

FLAC's built in integrity checks are far more useful then devising a scheme to use MD5 sum files. This will check all the FLAC in a directory and output only errors. Remove the "s" after the "t" and it will be somewhat verbose in the check.

This command is meant to be used to make a lightweight backup, for when you want to know which files might be missing or changed, but you don't care about their contents (because you have some way to recover them). Explanation of parts: "ls -RFal /" lists all files in and below the root directory, along with their permissions and some other metadata. I think sudo is necessary to allow ls to read the metadata of certain files. "| gzip" compresses the result, from 177 MB to 16 MB in my case. "> all_files_list.txt.gz" saves the result to a file in the current directory called all_files_list.txt.gz. This name can be changed, of course. Show Sample Output

Remove security from PDF document using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need ghostscript for this baby to work.

The above url contains over 6700 of the common ad websites. The command just pastes these into your /etc/hosts. Show Sample Output

Useful if a different user cannot access some directory and you want to know which directory on the way misses the x bit. Show Sample Output

Displays a scrolling banner which loops until you hit Ctrl-C to terminate it. Make sure you finish your banner message with a space so it will loop nicely.

If you want all the URLs from all the sessions, you can use : perl -lne 'print for /url":"\K[^"]+/g' ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/sessionstore.js Thanks to tybalt89 ( idea of the "for" statement ). For perl purists, there's JSON and File::Slurp modules, buts that's not installed by default.

blue and yellow colored bash prompt for a Hanukkah celebration on your box

This command, taken from play's manual page, plays a synthesized guitar tone for each of the strings on a standard tuned guitar. The command "play" is a part of the package "sox".

Thanks to comment if that works or not... If you have already typed that snippet or you know you already have IO::Interface::Simple perl module, you can type only the last command : perl -e 'use IO::Interface::Simple; my $ip=IO::Interface::Simple->new($ARGV[0]); print $ip->address,$/;' <INTERFACE> ( The first perl command will install the module if it's not there already... )

Knowing when a filesystem is created , you can deduce when an operating system was installed . find filesystem device (/dev/) informations by using the cat /etc/fstab command. Show Sample Output

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