If your user has sudo on the remote box, you can rsync data as root without needing to login as root. This is very helpful if the remote box does not allow root to login over SSH (which is a common security restriction).

Many Mac OS X programs, especially those in Microsoft:Office, create ASCII files with lines terminated by CRs (carriage returns). Most Unix programs expect lines separated by NLs (newlines). This little command makes it trivial to convert them.

This little command (function) shows the CSV header fields (which are field names separated by commas) as an ordered list, clearly showing the fields and their order.

Coming back to a project directory after sometime elsewhere?

Need to know what the most recently modified files are?

This little function "t" is one of my most frequent commands.

I have a tcsh alias for it also:

alias t 'ls -ltch \!* | head -20'

Ever wanted to find the most recently modified files, but couldn't remember exactly where they were in a project directory with many subdirectories? The "find" command, using a combination of "-mtime -N" and "-depth -D" can be used to find those files. If your directory structure isn't very deep, just omit the "-depth -D", but if your directory structure is very deep, then you can limit the depth of the traversal using "-depth -D", where "D" is the maximum number of directory levels to descend.

Finds all directories containing more than 99MB of files, and prints them in human readable format. The directories sizes do not include their subdirectories, so it is very useful for finding any single directory with a lot of large files.

In this case, I'm getting the package version for 'redhat-release', but of course, this can be applied to any package installed on the filesystem. This is very handy in scripts that need to determine just the version of the package, without the package name and all the sed and grep hackery to get to the data you want. To find out all the support format strings that 'rpm --qf' supports:

faster than lsof by at least x2 on my box.

This can be useful for those who have mounted NetApp file-systems with snapshot activated.

I am using .bat commands to execute Curl commands for Twitter API

when we add a new package to a aptitude (the debian package manager) we need to add the gpg, otherwise it will show warning / error for missing key

when we add a new package to a aptitude (the debian package manager) we need to add the gpg, otherwise it will show warning / error for missing key

Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing

"ibase=16; obase=8; F2A"

to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

Useful for quick calculations at the command line. $math_expr is any arithmetic expression (see sample output):

4.5*16+3^2

s(3.1415926/2)

More options in the bc man page.

Allows for quick mass renaming, assuming the user has some familiarity with regular expressions. Basically, it replaces the original_file_name in the output of ls with

"mv -v original_file_name new_file_name"

and passes the output to sh.

parses the output of ifconfig to show only the configured ip address (in this case from interface eth0).

the regexp is quick'n'dirty im sure it can be done in a better way.

--> this alias does not show your "internet ip" when you're in a nat-environment

cdrecord must be installed.

usefull alias:

now iso burning is like.

release upgrades are major upgrades as from 8.04 to 8.10 or from 8.10 to 9.04

update-manager-core must be installed:

in some cases you must edit '/etc/update-manager/release-upgrades' and set 'Prompt=normal'

It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially.

I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.