Commands tagged Linux (266)

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[vim] Clear a file in three characters (plus enter)
% selects every line in the file. 'd' deletes what's selected. It's a pretty simple combination.

shell bash iterate number range with for loop

Clean up poorly named TV shows.
Replace 'SHOWNAME' with the name of the TV show. Add -n to test the command without renaming files. Check the 'sample output'.

generate 30 x 30 matrix
or $ od /dev/urandom -w60 -An|sed 's/ ..../ /g'|head -n 30 (this one lacks digits 8 and 9)

Save a file you edited in vim without the needed permissions
I often forget to sudo before editing a file I don't have write permissions on. When you come to save that file and get the infamous "E212: Can't open file for writing", just issue that vim command in order to save the file without the need to save it to a temp file and then copy it back again.

Create a zip file ignoring .svn files

Multi line grep using sed and specifying open/close tags
This line does not include your closing tag in the output.

Unaccent an entire directory tree with files.
This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything. Some notes: 1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent. 2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding. 3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

Merge video files together using mencoder (part of mplayer)
Using mplayer's mencoder, you can merge video files together. '-oac' specifies the audio encoding (here copy, to just copy and not compress) '-ovc' specifies the video encoding (same thing).

Find all folder in /var that contains log in their path and have more than 10 files inside them, print the folder and the count
-L is for following symbolic links, it can be omitted and then you can find in your whole / dir


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