Xsane produces PDFs that are too large - particularly multipage PDFs. This command compresses them. If you do not use A4, remove the -sPAPERSIZE flag.

I recently found myself with a filesystem I couldn't write to and a bunch of files I had to get the hell out of dodge, preferably not one at a time. This command makes it possible to pack a bunch of files into a single archive and write it to a remote server.

host is a simple utility for performing DNS lookups. It is normally used to convert names to IP addresses and vice versa. When no arguments or options are given, host prints a short summary of its command line arguments and options.

bc is a wonderful calculator. Just type bc at the command line and have at it. Ctrl+D (or type quit) will get you out. This usage is just scratching the surface: bc can handle a mini scripting language, complete with variable, statements, loop, conditional statements and more. Do a man page on it to find out.

Short and sweet command. This command is also useful for other information such as what IP address a particular user logged in from, how long had they been logged in, what shell do they use.

bvi is your vi for binary editing. If your system does not have it, you can get it from

http://bvi.sourceforge.net/

tested in csh on solaris.

hello

Sometimes you want to know the summary of the sizes of directories without seeing the details in their subdirectories. Especially if it is going to just scroll off the screen. This one liner summarizes the disk usage of any number of directories in a directory without giving all the details of whats happening underneath.

Run this in your music folder, or give the path directly after "find".

The sed pattern filters away the basename.

That will capture 200 seconds of video at fullscreen 1680x1050 resolution, but scaled down 25 percent, with 15 frames per second.

http://fusioncast.blogspot.com/2007/09/infobyte-how-i-record-my-desktop.html

Be aware of using the --password argument as it will appear your password in plain text on the screen. You may use -p argument instead, it will prompt you to enter you password in hidden mode.

explanation:

grep -- displays process ids

-v -- negates the matching, displays all but what is specified in the other options

-u -- specifies the user to display, or in this case negate

The process loops through all PIDs that are found by pgrep, then orders a forced kill to the processes in numerical order, effectively killing the parent processes first including the shells in use which will force the users to logout.

Tested on Slackware Linux 12.2 and Slackware-current

Say you need to ping every 5th IP address on your network .. this will give you a way of doing that.

jot can also do counting ... like

1

2

3

4

download from http://oreilly.com/catalog/upt2/examples/#jot or fins athena-jot in rpm format

Handy if all you have is a console session or tty.

Depending on the network setup, you may not get the hostname.

Display which user run process from given port name

The --parents option will cause cp or mkdir to automatically create the parent directory structure.

will create /one, /one/two, and /one/two/three as needed before creating dir. cp will copy files with their full directory structure into the target directory with this option.

Thanks to Peter Leung at:

http://linuxcommando.blogspot.com/2007/11/use-of-parents-flag-in-mkdir-and-c.html

which has good examples of usage.