Commands using tail (292)

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Find last reboot time
Specific to OSX.

Remove a range of lines from a file

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Get the IP address of a machine. Just the IP, no junk.
Why use many different utilities all piped together, when you only need two?

Burn CD/DVD from an iso, eject disc when finished.
cdrecord -scanbus will tell you the (x,y,z) value of your cdr (for example, mine is 3,0,0)

Update dyndns.org with your external IP.
This is great if you are behind a router that does not support dynamic dns updates! Example: AT&T u-verse gateway... Put this in a script and run it as a cron job.

Tell what is encoded in a float, given its HEX bytes
It handles all possible combination of the hex bytes, including NaNs, Infinities, Normalized and Subnormal Numbers... $ This crazy DC stuff spent me a few days to write, optimize, polish and squeeze so that it works within the tight 255 character bound... $ You can modify it easily for other IEEE754 numbers, say, half, double, double-extended, quadruple $ (I hope someone will find this useful and submit more dc code to commandlinefu!)

Find top 5 big files
zsh: list of files sorted by size, greater than 100mb, head the top 5. '**/*' is recursive, and the glob qualifiers provide '.' = regular file, 'L' size, which is followed by 'm' = 'megabyte', and finally '+100' = a value of 100

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.


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