This command is meant to be used to make a lightweight backup, for when you want to know which files might be missing or changed, but you don't care about their contents (because you have some way to recover them). Explanation of parts: "ls -RFal /" lists all files in and below the root directory, along with their permissions and some other metadata. I think sudo is necessary to allow ls to read the metadata of certain files. "| gzip" compresses the result, from 177 MB to 16 MB in my case. "> all_files_list.txt.gz" saves the result to a file in the current directory called all_files_list.txt.gz. This name can be changed, of course. Show Sample Output

This command is a great way to check to see if acpi is doing damage to your disks by agressivly parking the read arm and wearing down it's life. As you can see, mine has lost half its life. I'm sure this could be shortened though somehow. It will use smartctl to dump the stats and then grep out just the temperature and load cycles for the disk (a load cycle is when a the read arm comes out of park and wears on the drive). Show Sample Output

Comcast is an ISP in the United States that has started hijacking DNS requests as a "service" for its customers. For example, in Firefox, one used to be able to do a quick "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search by typing a single word into the URL field, assuming the word is not an existing domain when surrounded by www.*.com. Comcast customers never receive the correct NX (non-existent domain) error from DNS. Instead, they are shown a page full of advertising. There is a way to "opt out" from their service, but that requires having the account password and the MAC address of your modem handy. For me, it was easier just to set static DNS servers. But the problem is, which ones to choose? That's what this command answers. It'll show you the three _non-hijacked_ Comcast DNS servers that are the shortest distance away. Perhaps you don't have Comcast (lucky you!), but hopefully this command can serve as an example of using netselect to find the fastest server from a list. Note that, although this example doesn't show it, netselect will actually perform the uniq and DNS resolution for you. Requires: netselect, curl, sort, uniq, grep Show Sample Output

replace eth0 with your ethernet or wireless network interface. Show Sample Output

It seems to completely void the benefit of having an encrypted folder if you then have a script on your unencrypted hard drive with your password in it. This command will mount a truecrypt file at a given mount point after asking you for the password.

Change the APP variable's value to whatever you want to install. Depending on how fast your machine is, you'll want to adjust the value 50 to something else. You might also want to play a different game than Gnometris - just make sure it's a GUI game.

In a folder with many files and folders, you want to move all files where the date is >= the file olderFilesNameToMove and

The output is only partial because runtime dependencies should count in also commands executed via system() and libraries loaded with dlopen(), but at least it gives an idea of what a package directly links to. Note: this is meaningful *only* if you're using -Wl,--as-needed in your LDFLAGS, otherwise it'll bring you a bunch of false positives. Show Sample Output

My variation on an audio burning command from commandlinefu - this one doesn't crap out if you want to burn a CD in a directory whose permissions don't allow it, and instead rips everything to /tmp. If you mount your music partition like I do using Samba, you probably don't have write permission inside that file system in order to create the temporary directory other audio burning commands here use. Not a bad idea to add cdrom to your groups, and /bin/eject with visudo.

The above command assumes the lost data is on /dev/sda and you previously issued the following command to mount _another_ disk or partition (/dev/sdb1) on /recovery sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /recovery If you don't do this, the data could be overwrited! foremost is a very powerful carving tool. By default foremost recovers all known file types. If you want to reduce the amount of files that are recovered you can specify the file type you are looking for. Read the man page to know the available file types. i.e to recover JPEG pictures append to foremost the switch -tjpg

An alternative which does not require to be root

If you spot a dubious looking cp command running you can use this command to view what is being copied and to where. 1234 is the PID of the cp command being passed to the lsof utility. 3r.*REG will display the file/directory that is being read/copied. 4w.*REG will display the destination it is being written to.

in Debian-based systems apt-get could be limited to the specified bandwidth in kilobytes using the apt configuration options(man 5 apt.conf, man apt-get). I'd quote man 5 apt.conf: "The used bandwidth can be limited with Acquire::http::Dl-Limit which accepts integer values in kilobyte. The default value is 0 which deactivates the limit and tries uses as much as possible of the bandwidth..." "HTTPS URIs. Cache-control, Timeout, AllowRedirect, Dl-Limit and proxy options are the same as for http..."

Kudos to http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/8275/grub2-set-super-mario-as-startup-tune

Place this code at the beginning of your script to ensure that it can only be executed by the root.

This script will run each time you boot up.The script must be in /etc/init.d directory.

The keycodes are a result of pressing: Mute (Fn+F1) a Show Sample Output

for debian/ubuntu

This is a useful command to backup an sd card with relative total size for piping to pv with a progressbar

Opening several files at once in Vim can be very easy in connection with find command.