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generate random password
-B flag = don't include characters that can be confused for other characters (this helps when you give someone their password for the first time so they don't cause a lockout with, for example, denyhosts or fail2ban) -s flag = make a "secure", or hard-to-crack password -y flag = include special characters (not used in the example because so many people hate it -- however I recommend it) "1 10" = output 1 password, make it 10 characters in length For even more secure passwords please use the -y flag to include special characters like so: $ pwgen -Bsy 10 1 output>> }&^Y?.>7Wu

Recursively search and replace old with new string, inside every instance of filename.ext
This is a slightly modified version of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/4283/recursive-search-and-replace-old-with-new-string-inside-files (which did not work due to incorrect syntax) with the added option to sed inside only files named filename.ext

Fast file backup
This is a BASH feature. The above command will create a backup of "filename" called "filename.DATE", where DATE is the actual day in %Y%m%d (year, month and day numbers together) format.

Show numerical values for each of the 256 colors in bash
Same as http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/5876, but for bash. This will show a numerical value for each of the 256 colors in bash. Everything in the command is a bash builtin, so it should run on any platform where bash is installed. Prints one color per line. If someone is interested in formatting the output, paste the alternative.

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.

Image to color palette generator
Extract a color palette from a image useful for designers. Example usage: $extract-palette myawesomeimage.jpg 4 Where the first argument is the image you want to extract a palette from. The second argument is the number of colors you want. It may be the case where you want to change the search space. In that case, change the -resize argument to a bigger or smaller result. See the ImageMagick documentation for the -resize argument.

Redirect tar extract to another directory
The command extracting the tar contents into particular directory ...

Setting global redirection of STDERR to STDOUT in a script
You have a script where =ALL= STDERR should be redirected to STDIN and you don't want to add "2>&1" at the end of each command... E.G.: $ ls -al /foo/bar 2>&1 Than just add this piece of code at the beginning of your script! I hope this can help someone. :)

print the name of each package APT knows [matching a prefix]
In this case, linux- is the prefix; simply running $apt-cache pkgnames would list every package APT knows about. The default APT config assumes -g, --generate; to use the cache as/is, you could similarly run: $apt-cache --no-generate pkgnames [prefix] Adding --all-names, like so: $apt-cache --no-generate --all-names pkgnames [prefix] would print all the packages APT knows about, using the cache as/is, including virtual packages and missing dependencies. This command was shamelessly stolen from the apt-cache(8) man-page.

print a cpu of a process


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