dname is a directory named something like 20090803 for Aug 3, 2009. lastbackup is a soft link to the last backup made - say 20090802. $folder is the folder being backed up. Because this uses hard linking, files that already exist and haven't changed take up almost no space yet each date directory has a kind of "snapshot" of that day's files. Naturally, lastbackup needs to be updated after this operation. I must say that I can't take credit for this gem; I picked it up from somewhere on the net so long ago I don't remember where from anymore. Ah, well...

Systems that are only somewhat slicker than this costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars - but we're HACKERS! We don't need no steenkin' commercial software... :)

Calculates md5 sum of files. sort (required for uniq to work). uniq based on only the hash. use cut ro remove the hash from the result.

This requires the command-line print extension (see #2861 for more details). I use it to make up complex images with formatted text using CSS and whatnot. It's a lot slicker than imagemagick for certain things. Now imagine using a local webserver with PHP and a database to generate the images. Oh, the possibilities...

This uses the "command-line print" plugin for Firefox (http://torisugari.googlepages.com/commandlineprint2). This same plugin can also produce PNGs. On *nix, the file must exist; therefore the touch bit in front. Also, firefox seems to ignore saved user preferences when "printing" this way (margins, header, footer, etc.), so I had to tweak my ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/prefs.js file by hand. Yup, that's *prefs.js* not user.js - apparently, firefox ignores my user.js file too...

This is an extract from a larger script which formats the video for DVD. The videos I use have no audio track so I need to add one. Tweak as you like...

This is an extract from a larger script which makes up slideshow videos from images. $seconds is the number of seconds the video will last, and $num is a loop counter which numbers the videos for concat into a longer video later, so they will be in order. The dev/null bit on the end cuts ffmpeg's verbosity.

The example command deletes all aliases for network interface 'em0' assuming that the aliases have netmask of 255.255.255.255 and the master IP has some other netmask (such as 255.255.255.0). See here -> http://my.galagzee.com/2009/07/22/deleting-all-network-interface-aliases/ for more on the rationale of this command.

I use this as an alias:

alias authplain "printf '\!:1\0\!:1\0\!:2' | mmencode | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/^/AUTH PLAIN /'"

then..

# authplain someuser@somedomain.com secretpassword

AUTH PLAIN c29tZXVzZXJAc29tZWRvbWFpbi5jb20Ac29tZXVzZXJAc29tZWRvbWFpbi5jb20Ac2VjcmV0cGFzc3dvcmQ=

#

Retrieve top ip threats from http://isc.sans.org/sources.html and add them into iptables output chain.

tired of switching to the console to check if some command has finished yet? if notify-send does not work on your box try this one... e.g. rsync -av -e /usr/bin/lsh $HOME slowconnection.bar:/mnt/backup ; z (now fire up X, do something useful, get notified if this stuff has finished).

When run on a mac, this command will bring up a dialog box in the Terminal when server HOSTNAME first responds to a ping.

This command starts screen with 'htop', 'nethogs' and 'iotop' in split-screen. You have to have these three commands (of course) and specify the interface for nethogs - mine is wlan0, I could have acquired the interface from the default route extending the command but this way is simpler.

htop is a wonderful top replacement with many interactive commands and configuration options. nethogs is a program which tells which processes are using the most bandwidth. iotop tells which processes are using the most I/O.

The command creates a temporary "screenrc" file which it uses for doing the triple-monitoring. You can see several examples of screenrc files here: http://www.softpanorama.org/Utilities/Screen/screenrc_examples.shtml

Get the name of the parent command. This might be helpful, if you need to react on that information. E. g. a script called directly via ssh has got sshd as parent, manually invoked the parent process will probably be bash

If you are doing some tests which require reboots (e. g. startup skripts, kernel module parameters, ...), this is very time intensive, if you have got a hardware with a long pre-boot phase due to hardware checks.

At this time, kexec can help, which only restarts the kernel with all related stuff.

First the kernel to be started is loaded, then kexec -e jumps up to start it.

Is as hard as a reboot -f, but several times faster (e. g. 1 Minute instead of 12 on some servers here).

Resizes all images in the curent directory to x resolution.

It is better than `mogrify -resize *.jpg` because of independence from extension of image (e.g. .jpg and .JPG) (:

If you know the benefits of screen, then this might come in handy for you. Instead of ssh'ing into a machine and then running a screen command, this can all be done on one line instead. Just have the person on the machine your ssh'ing into run something like

Then you would run

and be attached to the same screen session.

I wanted all the 'hidden' .flv files from the http link in the command line; wget seemed appropriate, fed with output from lynx, grep the flv files and the normalised via sed (to remove the numeric bullet). Similar to the 'Grab mp3 files' fu. Replace link with your own, grep arg with something more interesting ;) See here for something along the same lines...

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1006/grab-mp3-files-from-your-favorite-netcasts-mp3blog-or-sites-that-often-have-good-mp3s

Hope you find it useful! Improvements welcome, naturally.

Useful for analyzing disk usage. If you prefer GUI try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filelight or http://www.marzocca.net/linux/baobab/

Useful if you f.i. want to block/allow all connections from a certain provider which uses successive netnames for his ip blocks. In this example I used the german Deutsche Telekom which has DTAG-DIAL followed by a number as netname for the dial in pools.

There are - as always ;) - different ways to do this. If you have seq available you can use

or without seq you can use bash brace expansion

or if you like while better than for use something like

and so on.