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Backup your hard drive with dd
This will create an exact duplicate image of your hard drive that you can then restore by simply reversing the "if" & "of" locations. $ sudo dd if=/media/disk/backup/sda.backup of=/dev/sda Alternatively, you can use an SSH connection to do your backups: $dd if=/dev/sda | ssh user@ssh.server.com dd of=~/backup/sda.backup

Line Separator That is Width of Terminal
Creates a line seperator that will be the width of your window.

An alarm clock using xmms2 and at
Nice little alarm clock to wake you up on time (hopefully). You can also do 'echo "vlc path/to/song" | at 6:00

Get the number of days in a given month and year

Get My Public IP Address

Give {Open,True}Type files reasonable names
Just a quick hack to give reasonable filenames to TrueType and OpenType fonts. I'd accumulated a big bunch of bizarrely and inconsistently named font files in my ~/.fonts directory. I wanted to copy some, but not all, of them over to my new machine, but I had no idea what many of them were. This script renames .ttf files based on the name embedded inside the font. It will also work for .otf files, but make sure you change the mv part so it gives them the proper extension. REQUIREMENTS: Bash (for extended pattern globbing), showttf (Debian has it in the fontforge-extras package), GNU grep (for context), and rev (because it's hilarious). BUGS: Well, like I said, this is a quick hack. It grew piece by piece on the command line. I only needed to do this once and spent hardly any time on it, so it's a bit goofy. For example, I find 'rev | cut -f1 | rev' pleasantly amusing --- it seems so clearly wrong, and yet it works to print the last argument. I think flexibility in expressiveness like this is part of the beauty of Unix shell scripting. One-off tasks can be be written quickly, built-up as a person is "thinking aloud" at the command line. That's why Unix is such a huge boost to productivity: it allows each person to think their own way instead of enforcing some "right way". On a tangent: One of the things I wish commandlinefu would show is the command line HISTORY of the person as they developed the script. I think it's that conversation between programmer and computer, as the pipeline is built piece-by-piece, that is the more valuable lesson than any canned script.

Quick plotting of a function
The arguments of "seq" indicate the starting value, step size, and the end value of the x-range. "awk" outputs (x, f(x)) pairs and pipes them to "graph", which is part of the "plotutils" package.

Delete C style comments using vim

Project your desktop using xrandr
HDMI-1 is the interface in the example, which can be obtained just by typing xrandr and surfing through the output. There are a hell lot of configurations that can be done but I prefer auto because it works in most cases. $ Lifesaver

diff output of two commands
This only works in bash


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