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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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

Use file(1) to view device information
file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands. See also: $ file -s /dev/dm-* $ file -s /dev/cciss/* etc..

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" }

Copy all documents PDF in disk for your home directory
I used this to copy all PDFs recursively to a selected dir

Look at your data as a greymap image.
Keep width to a power of 2 to see patterns emerge. 512 is good. So is 4096 for huge maps. PNM headers are super basic. http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/pbm.html

get cookies from firefox
useful to use after with the --load-cookies option of wget

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

create a nicely formatted example of a shell command and its output
Shell function which takes a bash command as its input, and displays the following formatted output: EXAMPLE: command OUTPUT: output from command

Download a new release of a program that you already have very quickly
Zsync is an implementation of rsync over HTTP that allows updating of files from a remote Web server without requiring a full download. For example, if you already have a Debian alpha, beta or RC copy downloaded, zsync can just download the updated bits of the new release of the file from the server. This requires the distributor of the file to have created a zsync build control file (using zsyncmake).

Put public IP address in a variable


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