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send a circular
don't need echo :P

Convert one file from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8.
Nothing fancy it just converts one file from one character encoding into another one.

Get http headers for an url

shell function to make gnu info act like man.
For those who hate navigating info pages, a shell function which will dump the contents to stdout, then page it through less, thus acting like 'man'.

a function to create a box of '=' characters around a given string.
First argument: string to put a box around. Second argument: character to use for box (default is '=') Same as command #4948, but shorter, and without the utility function.

Check if the Debian package was used since its installation/upgrade.
This script compares the modification date of /var/lib/dpkg/info/${package}.list and all the files mentioned there. It could be wrong on noatime partitions. Here is non-oneliner: #!/bin/sh package=$1; list=/var/lib/dpkg/info/${package}.list; inst=$(stat "$list" -c %X); cat $list | ( while read file; do if [ -f "$file" ]; then acc=$(stat "$file" -c %X); if [ $inst -lt $acc ]; then echo used $file exit 0 fi; fi; done exit 1 )

Push your present working directory to a stack that you can pop later
If are a Bash user and you are in a directory and need to go else where for a while but don't want to lose where you were, use pushd instead of cd. cd /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget pushd /tmp cd thing/in/tmp popd (returns you to /home/complicated/path/.I/dont/want/to/forget)

Multi-line grep
Using perl you can search for patterns spanning several lines, a thing that grep can't do. Append the list of files to above command or pipe a file through it, just as with regular grep. If you add the 's' modifier to the regex, the dot '.' also matches line endings, useful if you don't known how many lines you need are between parts of your pattern. Change '*' to '*?' to make it greedy, that is match only as few characters as possible. See also http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1764/display-a-block-of-text-with-awk to do a similar thing with awk. Edit: The undef has to be put in a begin-block, or a match in the first line would not be found.

Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code
I have a bash alias for this command line and find it useful for searching C code for error messages. The -H tells grep to print the filename. you can omit the -i to match the case exactly or keep the -i for case-insensitive matching. This find command find all .c and .h files

Securely destroy data (including whole hard disks)
GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards. You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun. Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)


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