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direct a single stream of input (ls) to multiple readers (grep & wc) without using temporary files

calculate the total size of files in specified directory (in Megabytes)
the command will calculate the size of hidden files

put an unpacked .deb package back together
If any changes have been made to the package while it was unpacked (ie, conffiles files in /etc modi‐fied), the new package will inherit the changes. This way you can make it easy to copy packages from one computer to another, or to recreate packages that are installed on your system, but no longer available elsewhere. Note: dpkg-repack will place the created package in the current directory.

GREP a PDF file.
PDF files are simultaneously wonderful and heinous. They are wonderful in being ubiquitous and mostly being cross platform. They are heinous in being very difficult to work with from the command line, search, grep, use only the text inside the PDF, or use outside of proprietary products. xpdf is a wonderful set of PDF tools. It is on many linux distros and can be installed on OS X. While primarily an open PDF viewer for X, xpdf has the tool "pdftotext" that can extract formated or unformatted text from inside a PDF that has text. This text stream can then be further processed by grep or other tool. The '-' after the file name directs output to stdout rather than to a text file the same name as the PDF. Make sure you use version 3.02 of pdftotext or later; earlier versions clipped lines. The lines extracted from a PDF without the "-layout" option are very long. More paragraphs. Use just to test that a pattern exists in the file. With "-layout" the output resembles the lines, but it is not perfect. xpdf is available open source at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

A command's package details
In Debian based distros, this command will list 'binutils' package details which contains 'nm' command. You can replace 'nm' to any other command.

Temporarily suspend and unsuspend a foreground job
Press ^Z, do what you need to do on the shell, then input % to resurrect the suspended job.

Test how well a web server handles concurrent connections and big load.
This command will execute 1000 requests to the http URL http://127.0.0.1:8000 handlink 100 concurent connections at a time. Then it will display statistics about the time that have been taken.

find which of the zip files contains the file you're searching for
This command find which of your zip (or jar) files (when you have lots of them) contains a file you're searching for. It's useful when you have a lot of zip (or jar) files and need to know in which of them the file is archived. It's most common with .jar files when you have to know which of the .jar files contains the java class you need. To find in jar files, you must change "zip" to "jar" in the "find" command. The [internal file name] must be changed to the file name you're searching that is archived into one of the zip/jar files. Before run this command you must step into the directory that contains the zip or jar files.

quickly formats a fat partition. usefull for flash drives

list files recursively by size


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