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Change a specific value in a path
Awk replaces the value of a specific field while retaining the field separator "/" .

Display rows and columns of random numbers with awk
Displays six rows and five columns of random numbers between 0 and 1. If you need only one column, you can dispense with the "for" loop.

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
Using -Z with grep and -0 with xargs handles file names with spaces and special characters.

Change host name
With sed you can replace strings on the fly.

Quick key/value display within /proc or /sys
Within /proc and /sys there are a lot of subdirectories, which carry pseudofiles with only one value as content. Instead of cat-ing all single files (which takes quite a time) or do a "cat *" (which makes it hard to find the filename/content relation), just grep recursively for . or use "grep . /blabla/*" (star instead of -r flag). For better readability you might also want to pipe the output to "column -t -s : ".

Mapreduce style processing
parallel can be installed on your central node and can be used to run a command multiple times. In this example, multiple ssh connections are used to run commands. (-j is the number of jobs to run at the same time). The result can then be piped to commands to perform the "reduce" stage. (sort then uniq in this example). This example assumes "keyless ssh login" has been set up between the central node and all machines in the cluster. bashreduce may also do what you want.

print character classes
Today I needed a way to print various character classes to use as input for a program I was writing. Also a nice way to visualize character classes.

Download latest NVIDIA Geforce x64 Windows driver
Download latest NVIDIA Geforce x64 Windows7-8 driver from Nvidia's website. Pulls the latest download version (which includes beta). This is the "English" version. The following command includes a 'sed' line to replace "english" with "international" if needed. You can also replace the starting subdomain with "eu." "uk." and others. Enjoy this one liner! 1 character under the max :) $wget "us.download.nvidia.com$(wget -qO- "$(wget -qO- "nvidia.com/Download/processFind.aspx?psid=95&pfid=695&osid=19&lid=1&lang=en-us" | awk '/driverResults.aspx/ {print $4}' | cut -d "'" -f2 | head -n 1)" | awk '/url=/ {print $2}' | sed -e "s/english/international/" | cut -d '=' -f3 | cut -d '&' -f1)"

Burn an ISO on commandline with wodim instead cdrecord

Lock your KDE4 remotely (via regular KDE lock)
Forgot to lock your computer? Want to lock it via SSH or mobile phone or use it for scheduled lock? TIP: Make a alias for this (e. g. as "lock"). I found some howtos for ugly X11 lock, but this will use regular KDE locking utility. Note that KDE 3 is using utility with another name (I guess with the same argument --forcelock) Tested on Kubuntu 8.10. Stay tuned for remote unlock.


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