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move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

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

Notepad in a browser
A commandline version of the notepad in a browser: http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/12161/notepad-in-a-browser-type-this-in-the-url-bar All credit to the origional author of this fantastic command, whos only failing as most of the comments pointed out was that it wasn't a command... well, now its a command. Send all upvotes to dtlp747.

clone an USB stick using dd + see its process
The following command will clone usb stick inside /dev/sdc to /dev/sdd Double check you got the correct usb sticks (origional-clone)with fdisk -l.

generate random password (works on Mac OS X)
Prepending env LC_CTYPE=C fixes a problem with bad bytes in /dev/urandom on Mac OS X

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

Copy the contents of one partition to another

send echo to socket network
this command will send a message to the socket 25 on host 192.168.1.2 in tcp. works on udp and icmp understand only IP address, not hostname. on the other side (192.168.1.2), you can listen to this socket and test if you receive the message. easy to diagnose a firewall problem or not.

Convert a MOV captured from a digital camera to a smaller AVI
Convert those .mov files that your digital camera makes to .avi Adjust the bitrate (-b) to get the appropriate file size. A larger bitrate produces a larger (higher quality) .avi file and smaller bitrate produces a smaller (lower quality) .avi file. Requires ffmpeg (see man page for details) (tested with canon camera MOV files) Other examples: $ffmpeg -i input.mov -sameq -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi $ffmpeg -i input.mov -b 1024k -vcodec msmpeg4v2 -acodec pcm_u8 output.avi

Finding the number of cpu's


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