Commands by OlofMeister11 (0)

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Create a 5 MB blank file
Useful for testing purposes

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Sort movies by length, longest first
handles file names with spaces and colons, fixes sort (numeric!), uses mplayer, same output format as other alternatives

put an unpacked .deb package back together
If any changes have been made to the package while it was unpacked (ie, conffiles files in /etc modi‐fied), the new package will inherit the changes. This way you can make it easy to copy packages from one computer to another, or to recreate packages that are installed on your system, but no longer available elsewhere. Note: dpkg-repack will place the created package in the current directory.

Bash Dialog
The dialog utility is used to create a basic level graphical user interface. We can use this in Shell script to create very useful programs.

Salvage a borked terminal
This works in some situations where 'reset' and the other alternatives don't.

Browse system RAM in a human readable form
This command lets you see and scroll through all of the strings that are stored in the RAM at any given time. Press space bar to scroll through to see more pages (or use the arrow keys etc). Sometimes if you don't save that file that you were working on or want to get back something you closed it can be found floating around in here! The awk command only shows lines that are longer than 20 characters (to avoid seeing lots of junk that probably isn't "human readable"). If you want to dump the whole thing to a file replace the final '| less' with '> memorydump'. This is great for searching through many times (and with the added bonus that it doesn't overwrite any memory...). Here's a neat example to show up conversations that were had in pidgin (will probably work after it has been closed)... $sudo cat /proc/kcore | strings | grep '([0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\})' (depending on sudo settings it might be best to run $sudo su first to get to a # prompt)

Find top 10 largest files in /var directory (subdirectories and hidden files included )
Same as above, but modified to show human readable output

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

Alias to securely run X from tty and close that tty afterwards.
There are different ways to run X, I prefer to run it without xdm/gdm. The problem is you can't lock X because one can press Ctrl+Alt+F1, press Ctrl+Z and kill you X locking process. Of course you can disable Ctrl+Alt* or Ctrl+Alt+Backspace keys, but it's inconvinient if you really need to switch into console.


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