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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

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Reboot as a different OS in Grub
This will reboot as the Grub 2 option.

A very simple and useful stopwatch
time read -sn1 (s:silent, n:number of characters. Press any character to stop)

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

Rename files in batch

Schedule a script or command in x num hours, silently run in the background even if logged out
This is helpful for shell scripts, I use it in my custom php install script to schedule to delete the build files in 3 hours, as the php install script is completely automated and is made to run slow. Does require at, which some environments without crontab still do have. You can add as many commands to the at you want. Here's how I delete them in case the script gets killed. (trapped) atq |awk '{print $1}'|xargs -iJ atrm J &>/dev/null

Split huge file into DVD+R size chunks for burning
Real DVD+R size is 4700372992 bytes, but I round down a little to be safe. To reconstitute use cat. "cat file.img.gz.aa file.img.gz.ab ..... > file.img.gz"

Fast search in man files or bz-files by keyword direct by man or bz files
For example we need find fast where located and described keyword COMMIT_EDITMSG in man files. Here example howto solve it by search with command bzgrep in man files. Generally these files in bz compressed format. You can use another keywords to your search. Common syntax is: bzgrep -lE keyword1 /usr/share/man/man?/optional-keyword-to-refine* or bzgrep -lE keyword1 /usr/share/man/man?/* where optional-keyword-to-refine is optional and may be omitted but used to speedup search Of course you may combine other options for bzgrep (its based on grep)

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

grep certain file types recursively
-exec works better and faster then using a pipe


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