Commands by qubyte (3)

  • Puts every word from a file into a new line

    Puts words on new lines, removing additional newlines.


    -1
    < <infile> tr ' \t' '\n' | tr -s '\n' > <outfile>
    qubyte · 2009-07-07 01:17:47 7
  • Grab your bibtex file from CiteULike.

    I love CiteULike. It makes keeping a bibtex library easy and keeps all my papers in one place. However, it can be a pain when I add new entries and have to go through the procedure for downloading the new version in my browser, so I made this to grab it for me! I actually pipe it directly into a couple of SED one liners to tidy it up a bit too. Extremely useful, especially if you make a custom BibTeX script that does this first. That way you can sort a fresh BibTeX file for each new paper with no faf. To use just replace with your CiteULike user name. It doesn't download entries that you've hidden but I don't use that feature anyway.


    -1
    curl -o <bibliography> "http://www.citeulike.org/bibtex/user/<user>"
    qubyte · 2009-03-26 23:08:14 7
  • Remove embedded fonts from a pdf.

    It's sometimes useful to strip the embedded fonts from a pdf, for importing into something like Inkscape. Be warned, this will increase the size of a pdf substantially. I tried this with only gs writing with -sDEVICE=pdfwrite but it doesn't seem to work, so I just pipe postscript output to ps2pdf for the same effect.


    1
    gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=- -q -dNOPAUSE With-Fonts.pdf -c quit | ps2pdf - > No-Fonts.pdf
    qubyte · 2009-03-25 03:46:00 23

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Set your profile so that you resume or start a screen session on login
From screen's manpage: "Attach here and now. In detail this means: If a session is running, then reattach. If necessary detach and logout remotely first. If it was not running create it and notify the user. This is the author's favorite." Toss this in your ~/.bash_profile so that you never have that "oh crap" moment where you wanted to run something in screen and didn't.

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Next time you are using your shell, try typing ctrl-x e (that is holding control key press x and then e). The shell will take what you've written on the command line thus far and paste it into the editor specified by $EDITOR. Then you can edit at leisure using all the powerful macros and commands of vi, emacs, nano, or whatever.

Random unsigned integer
works at least in bash. returns integer in range 0-32767. range is not as good, but for lots of cases it's good enough.

Set a Reminder for yourself via the notification system
This will be seen through your system's visual notification system, notify-osd, notification-daemon, etc. --- sleep accepts s,m,h,d and floats (date; sleep .25m; date) --- notify-send (-t is in milliseconds && -u low / normal / critical) man notify-send for more information --- notification-daemon can use b/i/u/a HTML

Remote backups with tar over ssh
Execute it from the source host, where the source files you wish backup resides. With the minus '-' the tar command deliver the compressed output to the standar output and, trough over the ssh session to the remote host. On the other hand the backup host will be receive the stream and read it from the standar input sending it to the /path/to/backup/backupfile.tar.bz2

Rename files in batch

Run a command when a file is changed

Display a wave pattern
Purely frivolous - print a sine/cosine curve to the console - the width varies as it progresses. Ctrl-C to halt.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Clone IDE Hard Disk
This command clone the first partition of the primary master IDE drive to the second partition of the primary slave IDE drive (!!! back up all data before trying anything like this !!!)

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