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list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Is it a terminal?
Oddly, the isatty(3) glibc C call doesn't have a direct analogue as a command 'isatty(1)'. All is not lost as you can use test(1). For example, your script might be run from a tty or from a GUI menu item but it needs to get user-input or give feedback. Now your script can test STDIN with 'isatty 0' or STDOUT with 'isatty 1' and use xmessage(1) if the tty is not available. The other way to test for this is with 'tty -s' - but that's only for STDIN.

Create full backups of individual folders using find and tar-gzip
Problem: I wanted to backup user data individually. In this example, all user data is located in "/mnt/storage/profiles", and about 25 folders inside, each with a username ( /mnt/storage/profiles/mike; /mnt/storage/profiles/lucy ...) I need each individual folder backed up, not the whole "/mnt/storage/profiles". So, using find while excluding directories depth and creating two variables (tarfile=username & desdir=destination), tar will create a .tgz file for each folder, resulting in a "mike_full.tgz" and "lucy_full.tgz".

Get your current Public IP

shell function to make gnu info act like man.
For those who hate navigating info pages, a shell function which will dump the contents to stdout, then page it through less, thus acting like 'man'.

Create the four oauth keys required for a Twitter stream feed
Twitter stream feeds now require authentication. This command is the FIRST in a set of five commands you'll need to get Twitter authorization for your final Twitter command. *** IMPORTANT *** Before you start, you have to get some authorization info for your "app" from Twitter. Carefully follow the instructions below: Go to dev.twitter.com/apps and choose "Create a new application". Fill in the form. You can pick any name for your app. After submitting, click on "Create my access token". Keep the resulting page open, as you'll need information from it below. If you closed the page, or want to get back to it in the future, just go to dev.twitter.com/apps Now customize FIVE THINGS on the command line as follows: 1. Replace the string "Consumer key" by copying & pasting your custom consumer key from the Twitter apps page. 2. Replace the string "Consumer secret" by copying & pasting your consumer secret from the Twitter apps page. 3. Replace the string "Access token" by copying & pasting your access token from the Twitter apps page. 4. Replace string "Access token secret" by copying & pasting your own token secret from the Twitter apps page. 5. Replace the string 19258798 with the Twitter UserID NUMBER (this is **NOT** the normal Twitter NAME of the user you want the tweet feed from. If you don't know the UserID number, head over to www.idfromuser.com and type in the user's regular Twitter name. The site will return their Twitter UserID number to you. 19258798 is the Twitter UserID for commandlinefu, so if you don't change that, you'll receive commandlinefu tweets, uhm... on the commandline :) Congratulations! You're done creating all the keys! Environment variables k1, k2, k3, and k4 now hold the four Twitter keys you will need for your next step. The variables should really have been named better, e.g. "Consumer_key", but in later commands the 256-character limit forced me to use short, unclear names here. Just remember k stands for "key". Again, remember, you can always review your requested Twitter keys at dev.twitter.com/apps. Our command line also creates four additional environment variables that are needed in the oauth process: "once", "ts", "hmac" and "id". "once" is a random number used only once that is part of the oauth procedure. HMAC is the actual key that will be used later for signing the base string. "ts" is a timestamp in the Posix time format. The last variable (id) is the user id number of the Twitter user you want to get feeds from. Note that id is ***NOT*** the twitter name, if you didn't know that, see www.idfromuser.com If you want to learn more about oauth authentication, visit oauth.net and/or go to dev.twitter.com/apps, click on any of your apps and then click on "Oauth tool" Now go look at my next command, i.e. step2, to see what happens next to these eight variables.

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

The Chronic: run a command every N seconds in the background
Chronic Bash function: $ chronic 3600 time # Print the time in your shell every hour $ chronic 60 updatedb > /dev/null # update slocate every minute Note: use 'jobs' to list background tasks and fg/bg to take control of them.

Use Dell Service Tag $1 to Find Machine Model [Model Name and Model Number]
255 Max Characters CommandLineFu for $dellurl='http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/en/details?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=hied&ServiceTag='

Perl one-liner to determine number of days since the Unix epoch
There are some environments that use this value for password and account expiration. It's helpful to be able to quickly determine the number of days since the Unix epoch (dse) when working directly with the configuration files as an administrator.


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