Commands using xargs (769)

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Get max number of arguments
Get max number of arguments that can be accepted by the exec() system call.

get a rough estimate about how much disk space is used by all the currently installed debian packages
The vaule is expressed in megabytes

Spell check the text in clipboard (paste the corrected clipboard if you like)
xclip -o > /tmp/spell.tmp # Copy clipboard contents to a temp file aspell check /tmp/spell.tmp # Run aspell on that file cat /tmp/spell.tmp | xclip # Copy the results back to the clipboard, so that you can paste the corrected text I'm not sure xclip is installed in most distributions. If not, you can install x11-apps package

Print just line 4 from a textfile
this method should be the fastest

delete multiple files from git index that have already been deleted from disk
delete multiple files from git index that have already been deleted from disk. this is pretty terrible, I'm looking for a better way. (much better!! http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1246/git-remove-files-which-have-been-deleted)

Get the Volume labels all bitlocker volumes had before being encrypted
Get information of volume labels of bitlocker volumes, even if they are encrypted and locked (no access to filesystem, no password provided). Note that the volume labels can have spaces, but only if you name then before encryption. Renaming a bitlocker partition after being encrypted does not have the same effect as doing it before.

Check the age of the filesystem
Very useful set of commands to know when your file system was created.

Copy a directory recursively without data/files

Video thumbnail
Faster thumbnail creation than '-itsoffset' $ffmpeg -itsoffset -4 -i test.avi -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 test.jpg

Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file
Say you're started "xzcat bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program >summary" an hour ago, and you of course forgot to enable progress output (you could've just put "awk 'NR%1000==0{print NR>"/dev/stderr"}{print}'" in the pipeline but it's too late for that now). But you really want some idea of how far along your program is. Then you can run the above command to see how many % along xzcat is in reading the file. Note that this is for the GNU/Linux version of lsof; the one found on e.g. Darwin has slightly different output so the awk part may need some tweaks.


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