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Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.
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Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.
exec -a $NAME $COMMAND $ARGS
`your_cmd -erase_all_files` is the real process, but harmless-looking getty appears in the process table.
Never actually had a need to do this, but interesting nonetheless... Tested in bash, dash.
-a $NAME
"pass NAME as the zeroth argument to COMMAND", i.e. customise the name of the process (as commonly seen with `ps`)
Invoked from within a shell script, this will print the directory in which the script resides. Doesn't depend on external tools, /proc/self/*, etc.. (`echo` is a shell builtin.) To see the *current working* directory of a script, use `pwd`.
This one-liner was useful in helping someone I know to get off of MS Exchange. `mailutil` proved to be a much better alternative than `fetchmail` or `getmail` in this case.
It quickly moved all mails to the destination server (a simple Dovecot/Maildir setup), with no need to convert back and forth between mbox/maildir on the user's own system.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.
This example uses xfreerdp, which builds upon the development of rdesktop. This example usage will also send you the remote machine's sound.
The above one-liner could be run against all HTML files in a directory. It renames the HTML files based on the text contained in their title tag. This helped me in a situation where I had a directory containing thousands of HTML documents with meaningless filenames.
I frequently use this trick to send my terminal settings to HPUX and older RHEL systems. This is due to the fact that terminfo support for rxvt-unicode (my preferred terminal app) does not exist on many older Linux and Unices.
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:
file -s /dev/dm-*
file -s /dev/cciss/*
etc..