Commands by minigeek (4)

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grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

Get your external IP address with a random commandlinefu.com command
There's been so many ways submitted to get your external IP address that I decided we all need a command that will just go pick a random one from the list and run it. This gets a list of "Get your external IP" commands from commanlinefu.com and selects a random one to run. It will run the command and print out which command it used. This is not a serious entry, but it was a learning exercise for me writing it. My personal favourite is "curl icanhazip.com". I really don't think we need any other ways to do this, but if more come you can make use of them with this command ;o). Here's a more useful command that always gets the top voted "External IP" command, but it's not so much fun: $ eval $(curl -s http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/matching/external/ZXh0ZXJuYWw=/sort-by-votes/plaintext|sed -n '/^# Get your external IP address$/{n;p;q}')

Edit a PDF's metadata using exiftool
Edit the pdf file foo.pdf's metadata. -overwrite_original overwrites the original file (w/o it exiftool creates a new file)

When feeling down, this command helps
$ sudo apt-get install sl $ man sl

quick copy
Utilizes shell expansion of {} to give the original filename and a new filename as arguments to `cp`. Can easily be extended to make multiple copies.

Play 89.3 @TheCurrent and get system notifications on song changes.
Plays the mp3 stream of The Current as a background job. When you are done run: $ fg %1 then to exit Quite possible with Growl for mac I'd guess, although have not tried. Libnotify needed for notification, stream will still work otherwise

Get IP from hostname

Synchronise a file from a remote server
You will be prompted for a password unless you have your public keys set-up.

Welcome humans!
Some information about robots. :-)

FAST Search and Replace for Strings in all Files in Directory
I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time.

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