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List directories recursively showing its sizes using only ls and grep
ls -lhR Lists everithing using -l "long listing format" wich includes the space used by the folder. Displays it in -h "human readable form" (i.e. 2.2G, 32K), and -R recurses subfolders. grep -e using a regex, show lines containing the word "total" or a ":" at the end of the line (those with the name of the folder) only.

Disable system bell in an X session
Execute this command in a terminal to disable the system-bell during X-session lifetime.

Count lines using wc.

Grab an interface's IP from ifconfig without screen clutter
Sometimes, you don't really care about all the other information that ifconfig spits at you (however useful it may otherwise be). You just want an IP. This strips out all the crap and gives you exactly what you want.

Use /dev/full to test language I/O-failsafety
The Linux /dev/full file simulates a "disk full" condition, and can be used to verify how a program handles this situation. In particular, several programming language implementations do not print error diagnostics (nor exit with error status) when I/O errors like this occur, unless the programmer has taken additional steps. That is, simple code in these languages does not fail safely. In addition to Perl, C, C++, Tcl, and Lua (for some functions) also appear not to fail safely.

Quickly add a new user to all groups the default user is in
This is a standard procedure for me, whenever I set up a new Raspberry Pi system. Because the default user is "pi", I quickly replace it with my own (e.g. "kostis"), but I have to substitute that user to all of pi's groups first, before deleting the default account. xargs helps a lot with that in a single line, while avoiding boring "for" loops. For everything trickier, there's always "parallel" :)

Go to directory or creat it and go to
For use in scripts this command is very usefull

Read info(1) pages using 'less' instead of GNU Texinfo
I like man pages, and I like using `less(1)` as my pager. However, most GNU software keeps the manual in the 'GNU Texinfo' format, and I'm not a fan of the info(1) interface. Just give me less. This command will print out the info(1) pages, using the familiar interface of less!

Decode base64-encoded file in one line of Perl
Another option is openssl.

Take screenshot through SSH
When connected to a box via ssh you can do a quick screenshot of that box using this command. After that you can rscp it over to your box and look at it.


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