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Query cheat.sh from the termianl. A quick access cheat sheet for a range of linux commands!

List only executables installed by a debian package
Safe for whitespaces in names.

tar copy
Just a copy of a big dir when you wan't things like ownership and date etc etc to be untouched. Note: Updated with the ideas from "mpb".

Give {Open,True}Type files reasonable names
Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts. I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension. REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious). BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way". On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script.

Compress blank lines in VIM
This command will squeeze all consequent blank lines (including those with only space and tab charactes) to one. It will also empty the resulting line (remove the "|s/.*//" part if you don't need that).

Create test images
Useful to test programs and webpages.

Find files in multiple TAR files
A quick find command to identify all TAR files in a given path, extract a list of files contained within the tar, then search for a given string in the filelist. Returns to the user as a list of TAR files found (enclosed in []) followed by any matching files that exist in that archive. TAR can easily be swapped for JAR if required.

Print only the odd lines of a file (GNU sed)
The tilde address operator is an extension of GNU sed. It won't work with POSIX sed.

Save current layout of top
'top' has fancy layout modes where you can have several windows with different things displayed. You can configure a layout and then save it with 'W'. It will then be restored every time you run top. E.g. to have two colored windows, one sorted by CPU usage, the other by memory usage, run top $ top then press the keys $ and then as you don?t want to repeat this the next time: $

Enter a command but keep it out of the history
Put a space in front of your command on the command line and it will not be logged as part of your command line history.


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