Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

notice what happens when there is more than one unread message in a thread...

also people please dont hardcode the password when you use curl. Leave it out and curl will ask you when it runs. Please...?

This command allow you to ignore certain directories on SVN commands, like SVN STATUS. It is sad see a lot of temporary files from templates_c for each "svn status", no? ;-)

This works only on directories under revision control.

This helped me find a botnet that had made into my system. Of course, this is not a foolproof or guarantied way to find all of them or even most of them. But it helped me find it.

D/l ack from http://betterthangrep.com/

Force the user you want to watch doing things into doing his things in a screen session. Then simply attach yourself to that session with the command shown above.

Works only if you are on the same machine, of course

Opens a file or URL in the user's preferred application.

OS: Debian based (or those that use dpkg)

Equivalent to doing a dpkg -S on each file in $PATH, but way faster.

May report files generated though postinstall scripts and such. For example . It will report /usr/bin/vim .. which is not not a file installed directly by dpkg, but a link generated by alternatives hooks

Connect to a machine running ssh using mac address by using the "arp" command

Removes trailing newline; colon becomes record separator and newline becomes field separator, only the first field is ever printed. Replaces empty entries with $PWD. Also prepend relative directories (like ".") with the current directory ($PWD). Can change PWD with env(1) to get tricky in (non-Bourne) scripts.

This version uses Pipes, but is easier for the common user to grasp... instead of using sed or some other more complicated method, it uses the tr command

A x509 certificate and a rsa key file have in common a parameter called modulus, it is a very long hexadecimal number.

That value is unique for each certficate / key pair.

The command allows to do the check of this pair of values in a script using a great feature of bash. "

This is really fast :)

204753

real 0m0.191s

user 0m0.068s

sys 0m0.116s

Ripping VCD in Linux

When using reverse-i-search you have to type some part of the command that you want to retrieve. However, if the command is very complex it might be difficult to recall the parts that will uniquely identify this command. Using the above trick it's possible to label your commands and access them easily by pressing ^R and typing the label (should be short and descriptive).

UPDATE:

One might suggest using aliases. But in that case it would be difficult to change some parts of the command (such as options, file/directory names, etc).

This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages.

For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac:

If you want to see the name of the last person, who added a message to the conversation, change the greediness of the operators like this: