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Diff two directories by finding and comparing the md5 checksums of their contents.
Compute the md5 checksums for the contents of two mirrored directories, then sort and diff the results. If everything matches, nothing is returned. Otherwise, any checksums which do not match, or which exist in one tree but not the other, are returned. As you might imagine, the output is useful only if no errors are found, because only the checksums, not filenames, are returned. I hope to address this, or that someone else will!

Cut flv video from minute 19 to minute 20 using flvtool2
We should calculate the video duration to milliseconds, 1 minute = 60000 milliseconds

background a wget download

Remote execute command as sudoer via ssh
Example: remote install an application(wine). sshpass -p 'mypssword' ssh -t mysshloginname@192.168.1.22 "echo 'mypassword' | sudo -S apt-get install wine" Tested on Ubuntu.

Exclude svn directories with grep
exclude-dir option requires grep 2.5.3

Verify if user account exists in Linux / Unix

pip install into current directory without virtualenv
For subsequent commands in the prefixed path: $ PYTHONPATH=$PWD/lib/python*/site-packages ./bin/pip --version

Copy via tar pipe while preserving file permissions (cp does not!; run this command with root!)
cp options: -p will preserve the file mode, ownership, and timestamps -r will copy files recursively also, if you want to keep symlinks in addition to the above: use the -a/--archive option

Copy a file to a new directory created on the fly
You need to cp, mv, scp, ..., some files around from one place to another, and after having laboriously typed out the source path, you remember that the destination directory doesn't yet exist, and so the command will fail. So rather than killing the command line and starting over, just interpolate the results of creating the directory and echo its name. You could DRY this with a for; do; done, but that may be more trouble than it's worth.

macOS: Save disk space by moving apps to external drives
Because Mac app bundles contain everything in one place, it makes running them from anywhere, including from a device such as a USB flash drive or external HDD, possible. So if your Mac has a mere 256GB of storage (as mine does), you can free up large quantities of disk space by storing apps like, say, Xcode on external devices.


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