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Show UDID of iPhone
Display the serial of the iPhone (aka UDID).

create a .avi with many .jpg

drop first column of output by piping to this

Backup a filesystem to a remote machine and use cstream to throttle bandwidth of the backup
This command will nicely dump a filesystem to STDOUT, compress it, encrypt it with the gpg key of your choice, throttle the the data stream to 60kb/s and finally use ssh to copy the contents to an image on a remote machine.

Read null character seperated fields from a file
Handle any bad named file which contains ",',\n,\b,\t,` etc Store the file name as null character separated list $find . -print0 >name.lst and retrieve it using $read -r -d "" Eg: $find . -print0 >name.lst; $cat name.lst| while IFS="" read -r -d "" file; $do $ls -l "$file"; $done

cycle through a 256 colour palette
just for fun

beep when a server goes offline
pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable. Basically the opposite of: $ ping -a server-or-ip.com which would beep when a server IS reachable. You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a: $ while true; do [ "$(ping -c1W1w1 server-or-ip.com 2>/dev/null | awk '/received/ {print $4}')" = 1 ] && date || echo 'server is down!'; sleep 1; done which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo. Notes: Requires beep package. May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker) Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box... $ sudo apt-get install beep

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

add the result of a command into vi
in command mode, navigate your cursor to the line where you want the command output to appear, and hit "!!". No need to enter edit mode or even type a ":" (colon).

Split a large file, without wasting disk space
It's common to want to split up large files and the usual method is to use split(1). If you have a 10GiB file, you'll need 10GiB of free space. Then the OS has to read 10GiB and write 10GiB (usually on the same filesystem). This takes AGES. . The command uses a set of loop block devices to create fake chunks, but without making any changes to the file. This means the file splitting is nearly instantaneous. The example creates a 1GiB file, then splits it into 16 x 64MiB chunks (/dev/loop0 .. loop15). . Note: This isn't a drop-in replacement for using split. The results are block devices. tar and zip won't do what you expect when given block devices. . These commands will work: $ hexdump /dev/loop4 . $ gzip -9 < /dev/loop6 > part6.gz . $ cat /dev/loop10 > /media/usb/part10.bin


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