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Convert a SVG file to grayscale
It requires inkscape 0.46 and lxml packages

quick integer CPU benchmark
This is a quick and dirty way to generate a (non-floating-point) CPU-bound task to benchmark. Adjust "20" to higher or lower values, as needed. As a benchmark this is probably a little less bogus than bogomips, and it will run anywhere 'bc' does.

c_rehash replacement
When you don't have c_rehash handy. Really simple - if you have a .pem file that doesn't really contain a x509 cert (let's say, newreq.pem), it will create a link, simply called '.0', pointing to that file.

Retrieve the size of a file on a server
Downloads the entire file, but http servers don't always provide the optional 'Content-Length:' header, and ftp/gopher/dict/etc servers don't provide a filesize header at all.

Compare / diff two images
Outputs the number of different pixels. 2 params to increase tolerance: * thumbnails size * fuzz, the color distance tolerance See http://en.positon.org/post/Compare-/-diff-between-two-images for more details.

Split a large file, without wasting disk space
It's common to want to split up large files and the usual method is to use split(1). If you have a 10GiB file, you'll need 10GiB of free space. Then the OS has to read 10GiB and write 10GiB (usually on the same filesystem). This takes AGES. . The command uses a set of loop block devices to create fake chunks, but without making any changes to the file. This means the file splitting is nearly instantaneous. The example creates a 1GiB file, then splits it into 16 x 64MiB chunks (/dev/loop0 .. loop15). . Note: This isn't a drop-in replacement for using split. The results are block devices. tar and zip won't do what you expect when given block devices. . These commands will work: $ hexdump /dev/loop4 . $ gzip -9 < /dev/loop6 > part6.gz . $ cat /dev/loop10 > /media/usb/part10.bin

Remove all .svn folders
-depth argument will cause find to do a "depth first" tree search, this will eliminate the "No such file or directory" error messages

Find the package that installed a command

delete a particular line by line number in file
deletes line 3 in known_hosts text file


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