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Kill a broken ssh connection
This is useful for example if you are on ssh in a server and the server goes down without letting you out. This is part of a larget sets of escape sequences provided by ssh. You can find them with ~? Here's the list: ~. - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions) ~B - send a BREAK to the remote system ~C - open a command line ~R - request rekey ~V/v - decrease/increase verbosity (LogLevel) ~^Z - suspend ssh ~# - list forwarded connections ~& - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate) ~? - this message ~~ - send the escape character by typing it twice (Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

get colorful side-by-side diffs of files in svn with vim
This will diff your local version of the file with the latest version in svn. I put this in a shell function like so: $svd() { vimdiff

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs (inspired from the work of the user justsomeguy)
Friday is the 5th day of the week, monday is the 1st. Output may be affected by locale.

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Do command when logged in from certain ips using ssh
Place in ~/.bashrc If you login to a ssh server from different ips, sometimes you want to do something specific for each. e.g., quickly go into screen -x session from a phone, but not your desktop.

The Chromium OS rootfs is mounted read-only. In developer mode you can disable the rootfs verification, enabling it to be modified.

Extract tarball from internet without local saving

Create/open/use encrypted directory
Create/open/use an encrypted directory encfs needs to be installed During creation easiest to use default values The encrypted files will be in ~/.crypt and you will work as usual in ~/crypt To close the encrypted directory run: fusermount -u ~/crypt When you switch off the computer the encrypted directory will be automatically closed This example uses /home/user/crypt as encrypted directory I use ubuntu linux 8.04 and I am also the creator of www.minihowto.org

One liner to parse all epubs in a directory and use the calibre ebook-convert utility to convert them to mobi format
all ebook-convert -options are optional. all you really need to pass ebook-convert is the incoming and outgoing names, with extensions. Has been tested on Ubuntu 10.10


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