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find filenames and directory names that doesn't conform ISO 9660 level 2
You might want to check what file and directory names would be renamed or chopped if you create iso 9660 level 2 image out of them. Use this command to check first.

List available upgrades from apt without upgrading the system

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

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

Repeatedly purge orphaned packages on Debian-like Linuxes
Upgraded Debian/Ubuntu/etc. systems may have a number of "orphaned" packages which are just taking up space, which can be found with the "deborphan" command. While you could just do "dpkg --purge $(deborphan)", the act of purging orphans will often create more orphans. This command will get them all in one shot.

Blink Caps Lock on HDD activity
Some computers these days don't have an HDD activity light, but they still have a useless caps-lock, so why not re-purpose that light to show HDD activity? Requires setleds and dstat and probably needs to run as root.

Watch a movie in linux without the X windows system.

Take screenshots with imagemagick

Happy New Year!

Big (four-byte) $RANDOM
Sometimes, in a shell script, you need a random number bigger than the range of $RANDOM. This will print a random number made of four hex values extracted from /dev/urandom.


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