Commands by Aparicio (5)

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Pick a random line from a file
This is from perldoc -q random.*line, which says: This has a significant advantage in space over reading the whole file in. You can find a proof of this method in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, Section 3.4.2, by Donald E. Knuth. Who am I to argue with Don Knuth?

Find broken symlinks
To understand why this is the equivalent of "find -L /path/to/search -type l, see http://ynform.org/w/Pub/FindBrokenSymbolicLinks or look at http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html

get bofh excuse from a trusted source :-)

quickly formats a fat partition. usefull for flash drives

find with high precission (nanoseconds 1/1,000,000,000s) the last changed file.
this is good for variables if you have many script created files and if you want to know which one is the last created/changed one..

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
random file from files in directory

Find the package that installed a command

Calculate days on which Friday the 13th occurs
I removed the dependency of the English language

Run a command that has been aliased without the alias
Most distributions alias cp to 'cp -i', which means when you attempt to copy into a directory that already contains the file, cp will prompt to overwrite. A great default to have, but when you mean to overwrite thousands of files, you don't want to sit there hitting [y] then [enter] thousands of times. Enter the backslash. It runs the command unaliased, so as in the example, cp will happily overwrite existing files much in the way mv works.

list files recursively by size

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