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Create date-based tgz of current dir, runs in the background, very very cool
This is freaking sweet!!! Here is the full alias, (I didn't want to cause display problems on commandlinefu.com's homepage): $ alias tarred='( ( D=`builtin pwd`; F=$(date +$HOME/`sed "s,[/ ],#,g"

Monitor all DNS queries made by Firefox

DELETE all those duplicate files but one based on md5 hash comparision in the current directory tree
This one-liner will the *delete* without any further confirmation all 100% duplicates but one based on their md5 hash in the current directory tree (i.e including files in its subdirectories). Good for cleaning up collections of mp3 files or pictures of your dog|cat|kids|wife being present in gazillion incarnations on hd. md5sum can be substituted with sha1sum without problems. The actual filename is not taken into account-just the hash is used. Whatever sort thinks is the first filename is kept. It is assumed that the filename does not contain 0x00. As per the good suggestion in the first comment, this one does a hard link instead: $ find . -xdev -type f -print0 | xargs -0 md5sum | sort | perl -ne 'chomp; $ph=$h; ($h,$f)=split(/\s+/,$_,2); if ($h ne $ph) { $k = $f; } else { unlink($f); link($k, $f); }'

Remove color codes (special characters) with sed

Simple way to envoke a secure vnc session through ssh enabled router.
The ip address is of the remote machine running the vncserver. Must log in first to the router then the VNC session. Very nice if you have open-wrt or dd-wrt on your router.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

play audio stream and video stream in two different mplayer instances
Sometimes audio and video are not sync'ed. The factor 1.0884 is the quotient 48000/44100. One mplayer plays the audio file in the background, the other the video in the foreground. You can dump the audio file before with another commandlinefu

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).

Prevent overwriting file when using redirection
If you set noclobber to on, bash won't allow redirection to overwrite existing files . $ set -o noclobber command turn the option on (default it s off ) . You can still append information but not overwrite the file .to turn it back off use : $ set +o noclobber . I use it because i overwrite a file by accident , after thought , content of the file was very important , creating a one more file mean nothing for my hard disk (we are not anymore on the 64 k memory time) , but content of file is far much important . What we call exeprience :(

ubuntu tasksel
The command tasksel allows the choice of packages from the command line to get predefined configurations for specific services (usually this option is offered during installation).


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