Colorize output of make, gcc/g++ or diff, making it easier to read at a glance.

They are not distributed with make, diff or gcc, but are usually available in the repositories.

This one will work a little better, the regular expressions it is not 100% accurate for XML parsing but it will suffice any XML valid document for sure.

This is more or less the same as 'reset', but with two advantages: the initial LF character makes sure you're starting a new line to the tty driver, the final one is more reliably a line-end as CR is often unset; and second, 'stty sane' is reliable on older UNIX systems, especially Berkeley-based ones.

This works in some situations where 'reset' and the other alternatives don't.

This will mv all your mp3 files in the current directory to $ARTIST/$ALBUM/$NAME.mp3

Make sure not to use sudo - as some weird things can happen if the mp3 file doesn't have id3 tags.

Easy way to find out what Debian version your machine is running

I used this because I needed to sort the content of a bunch of gzipped log files. Replace sort with something else, or simply remove sort to just rezip everything

this will show the names of the deleted directories, and will delete directories that only no files, only empty directories.

If you are downloading a big file (or even a small one) and the connection breaks or times out, use this command in order to RESUME the download where it failed, instead of having to start downloading from the beginning. This is a real win for downloading debian ISO images over a buggy DSL modem.

Take the partially downloaded file and cat it into the STDIN of curl, as shown. Then use the "-C -" option followed by the URL of the file you were originally downloading.

Within /proc and /sys there are a lot of subdirectories, which carry pseudofiles with only one value as content. Instead of cat-ing all single files (which takes quite a time) or do a "cat *" (which makes it hard to find the filename/content relation), just grep recursively for . or use "grep . /blabla/*" (star instead of -r flag).

For better readability you might also want to pipe the output to "column -t -s : ".

put "-linux" option into $HOME/.indent.pro to make it default

Doesn't require password (asks for it instead)

Display the code of a previously defined shell function.

A quick way to find and delete empty dirs, it starts in the current working directory.

If you do find . -empty -type d you will see what could be removed, or to a test run.

Just a copy of a big dir when you wan't things like ownership and date etc etc to be untouched.

Note: Updated with the ideas from "mpb".

NAME

rev - reverse lines of a file or files

SYNOPSIS

rev [file ...]

DESCRIPTION

The rev utility copies the specified files to the standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line. If no files are specified, the standard input is read.

AVAILABILITY

The rev command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.

This command would move the file "dir/image.jpg" with a "DateTimeOriginal" of "2005:10:12 16:05:56" to "2005/10/12/image.jpg".

This is a literal example from the exiftool man page, very useful for classifying photo's. The possibilities are endless.

Since the original command (#1873) didn't work on FreeBSD whose stat lacks the "-c" switch, I wrote an alternative that does. This command shows also the fourth digit of octal format permissions which yields the sticky bit information.

dname is a directory named something like 20090803 for Aug 3, 2009. lastbackup is a soft link to the last backup made - say 20090802. $folder is the folder being backed up. Because this uses hard linking, files that already exist and haven't changed take up almost no space yet each date directory has a kind of "snapshot" of that day's files. Naturally, lastbackup needs to be updated after this operation. I must say that I can't take credit for this gem; I picked it up from somewhere on the net so long ago I don't remember where from anymore. Ah, well...

Systems that are only somewhat slicker than this costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars - but we're HACKERS! We don't need no steenkin' commercial software... :)

Calculates md5 sum of files. sort (required for uniq to work). uniq based on only the hash. use cut ro remove the hash from the result.

This requires the command-line print extension (see #2861 for more details). I use it to make up complex images with formatted text using CSS and whatnot. It's a lot slicker than imagemagick for certain things. Now imagine using a local webserver with PHP and a database to generate the images. Oh, the possibilities...

This uses the "command-line print" plugin for Firefox (http://torisugari.googlepages.com/commandlineprint2). This same plugin can also produce PNGs. On *nix, the file must exist; therefore the touch bit in front. Also, firefox seems to ignore saved user preferences when "printing" this way (margins, header, footer, etc.), so I had to tweak my ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/prefs.js file by hand. Yup, that's *prefs.js* not user.js - apparently, firefox ignores my user.js file too...

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...

This is an extract from a larger script which makes up slideshow videos from images. $seconds is the number of seconds the video will last, and $num is a loop counter which numbers the videos for concat into a longer video later, so they will be in order. The dev/null bit on the end cuts ffmpeg's verbosity.