All commands

(relies on 'imagemagick')

This command will convert all .pdf files in a directory into a 800px (wide or height, whichever is smaller) image (with the aspect ratio kept) .jpg.

If the file is named 'example1.pdf' it will be named 'example1.jpg' when it is complete.

This is a VERY worthwhile command! People pay hundreds of dollars for this in the Windows world.

My .jpg files average between 150kB to 300kB, but your's may differ.

Generated XML files often are poorly formatted. Use this command to properly indent and normalize the file in-place.

This is shorter and actually much faster than >/dev/null (see sample output for timings)

Plus, it looks like a disappointed face emoticon.

This command is more portable than it's cousin netstat. It works well on all the BSDs, GNU/Linux, AIX and Mac OS X. You won't find lsof by default on Solaris or HPUX by default, but packages exist around the web for installation, if needed, and the command works as shown. This is the most portable command I can find that lists listening ports and their associated pid.

While editing a source file in vim, or using vimdiff to compare two or more files, the ':TOhtml' command can be used to export each buffer as an html file, including syntax highlighting and vimdiff colorization. If you are in insert mode in vim, you will have to type

:TOhtml

This will open a new buffer filled with html, which you can then save.

sorts the files by integer megabytes, which should be enough to (interactively) find the space wasters. Now you can

for the above output,

for only the 3 biggest files and so on. It's always a good idea to have this line in your .profile or .bashrc

PDF files are simultaneously wonderful and heinous. They are wonderful in being ubiquitous and mostly being cross platform. They are heinous in being very difficult to work with from the command line, search, grep, use only the text inside the PDF, or use outside of proprietary products.

xpdf is a wonderful set of PDF tools. It is on many linux distros and can be installed on OS X. While primarily an open PDF viewer for X, xpdf has the tool "pdftotext" that can extract formated or unformatted text from inside a PDF that has text. This text stream can then be further processed by grep or other tool. The '-' after the file name directs output to stdout rather than to a text file the same name as the PDF.

Make sure you use version 3.02 of pdftotext or later; earlier versions clipped lines.

The lines extracted from a PDF without the "-layout" option are very long. More paragraphs. Use just to test that a pattern exists in the file. With "-layout" the output resembles the lines, but it is not perfect.

xpdf is available open source at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

That command installs "most" and make this command as the default man reader. The "most" works like "less" (the current man reader), but it render colors for manpages and may do more things. Read "man most".

You can see a preview here: http://www.dicas-l.com.br/dicas-l/20090718.php

How often do you make a directory (or series of directories) and then change into it to do whatever? 99% of the time that is what I do.

This BASH function 'md' will make the directory path then immediately change to the new directory. By using the 'mkdir -p' switch, the intermediate directories are created as well if they do not exist.

Uses the last argument of the last executed command, and gets the directory name from it.

Use $!:t for the filename alone, without the dirname.

OK, not the most useful but a good way to impress friends. Requires the "display" command from ImageMagick.

After the command is done, open the html file in a browser

Continue with:

Suspends all Firefox Threads. Results in Zero CPU load.

Useful when having 100+ Tabs open and you temporarily need the power elsewhere.

Be careful - might produce RACE CONDITIONS or LOCKUPS in other processes or FF itself.

matching is case sensitive.

This command will tell lynx to read keystrokes from the specified file - which can be used in a cronjob to auto-login on websites that give you points for logging in once a day *cough cough* (which is why I used -accept_all_cookies).

For creating your keystroke file, use:

Creates a full snapshot of your current vim session, including tabs, open buffers, cursor positions, everything. Can be resumed with vim -S . Useful for those times when you HAVE to close vim, but you don't want to lose all your hard-opened buffers and windows. The ! will cause vim to overwrite the file if it already exists. It is not necessary, but useful if you frequently save to the same file (like session.vim or something).

Long before tabbed terminals existed, people have been using Gnu screen to open many shells in a single text terminal. Combined with ssh, it gives you the ability to have many open shells with a single remote connection using the above options. If you detach with "Ctrl-a d" or if the ssh session is accidentally terminated, all processes running in your remote shells remain undisturbed, ready for you to reconnect. Other useful screen commands are "Ctrl-a c" (open new shell) and "Ctrl-a a" (alternate between shells). Read this quick reference for more screen commands: http://aperiodic.net/screen/quick_reference

Forwards localhost:1234 to machine:port, running all data through your chain of piped commands. The above command logs inbound and outbound traffic to two files.

Tip: replace tee with sed to manipulate the data in real time (use "sed -e 's/400 Bad Request/200 OK/'" to tweak a web server's responses ;-) Limitless possibilities.

Use this command to find out a list of committers sorted by the frequency of commits.

Dumps a MySQL database over a compressed SSH tunnel and uses it as input to mysql - i think that is the fastest and best way to migrate a DB to a new server!

file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands.

See also:

etc..

the -x option is for binding to a shell command

Of course it requires import command, from imagemagick tools, but it's simpler to type, and imagemagick is usefull anyway.