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Convert a string to

Copy history from one terminal to another
Or just do history -w before opening another terminal.

Validating a file with checksum

Know which version dpkg/apt considers more recent
Compares two versions with dpkg. It is not always obvious what version dpkg/apt will consider to be more recent. Operators include the following : * These treat an empty version as earlier than any version: lt le eq ne ge gt. * These treat an empty version as later than any version: lt-nl le-nl ge-nl gt-nl. * These are provided only for compatibility with control file syntax: < > >. This command doesn't output anything. It only returns with status 0 or 1, hence the echo "y" || echo "n" to get an output.

Recover a deleted file
grep searches through a file and prints out all the lines that match some pattern. Here, the pattern is some string that is known to be in the deleted file. The more specific this string can be, the better. The file being searched by grep (/dev/sda1) is the partition of the hard drive the deleted file used to reside in. The ?-a? flag tells grep to treat the hard drive partition, which is actually a binary file, as text. Since recovering the entire file would be nice instead of just the lines that are already known, context control is used. The flags ?-B 25 -A 100? tell grep to print out 25 lines before a match and 100 lines after a match. Be conservative with estimates on these numbers to ensure the entire file is included (when in doubt, guess bigger numbers). Excess data is easy to trim out of results, but if you find yourself with a truncated or incomplete file, you need to do this all over again. Finally, the ?> results.txt? instructs the computer to store the output of grep in a file called results.txt. Source: http://spin.atomicobject.com/2010/08/18/undelete?utm_source=y-combinator&utm_medium=social-media&utm_campaign=technical

Create new user with home dir and given password
The crypt function takes a password, key, as a string, and a salt character array which is described below, and returns a printable ASCII string which starts with another salt. It is believed that, given the output of the function, the best way to find a key that will produce that output is to guess values of key until the original value of key is found. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(Unix)

date offset calculations
The date command does offset calculations nicely, handles concepts like "a month" as you'd expect, and is good for offsets of at least 100M years in either direction.

Drop all tables from a database, without deleting it
Uses two comands, requieres mysqldump, but works as expected.

Create a DOS floppy image
mount with: mount -t msdos -o loop ./floppy.img /tmp/mnt

sqlite3 cmd to extract Firefox bookmarks from places.sqlite
Found this useful query at http://id.motd.org/pivot/entry.php?id=22. The b.parent=2 in the command refers to the bookmarks folder to extract. See the source webpage for additional info.


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