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Unaccent an entire directory tree with files.
This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything. Some notes: 1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent. 2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding. 3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

Make a thumbnail image of first page of a PDF.
convert is included in ImageMagick. Don't forget the [X] (where X is the page number). [0] is the first page of the PDF.

Create a file of a given size in linux
If you're trying to create a sparse file, you can use dd by 'skip'ing to the last block instance. ls -ls shows the actual size vs. the reported size

concat multiple videos into one (and add an audio track)
This is an extract from a larger script which formats the video for DVD. The videos I use have no audio track so I need to add one. Tweak as you like...

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

Fetch the requested virtual domains and their hits from log file
The command will read the apache log file and fetch the virtual host requested and the number of requests.

Command line progress bar
This command tar?s up a directory and sends the output to gzip, showing a rate of 223MB/s. This may require you installing the pv command. For debian based users out there: $ sudo aptitude install pv

Run netcat to server files of current folder

generate random mac address

Find all files under a certain directory /home that have a certain suffix at the end of the file name. Show the file and rename them to remove the suffix.


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