Commands by sharonallen (0)

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Change user, assume environment, stay in current dir
I've used this a number of times troubleshooting user permissions. Instead of just 'su - user' you can throw another hyphen and stay in the original directory.

cpu info

Backup a file with a date-time stamp
$ buf myfile.txt This is useful when you are making small but frequent changes to a file. It keeps things organised and clear for another administrator to see what changed and at what time. An overview of changes can be deduced using a simple: $ ls -ltr

Set OS X X11 to use installed Mathematica fonts

Selecting a random file/folder of a folder
Also looks in subfolders

scping files with streamlines compression (tar gzip)
it compresses the files and folders to stdout, secure copies it to the server's stdin and runs tar there to extract the input and output to whatever destination using -C. if you emit "-C /destination", it will extract it to the home folder of the user, much like `scp file user@server:`. the "v" in the tar command can be removed for no verbosity.

Verify MD5SUMS but only print failures
All valid files are withheld so only failures show up. No output, all checks good.

bash screensaver (scrolling ascii art with customizable message)
Displays a scrolling banner which loops until you hit Ctrl-C to terminate it. Make sure you finish your banner message with a space so it will loop nicely.

Redirect a filehandle from a currently running process.
This command uses the debugger to attach to a running process, and reassign a filehandle to a file. The two commands executed in gdb are p close(1) which closes STDOUT and p creat("/tmp/filename",0600) which creates a file and opens it for output. Since file handles are assigned sequentially, this command opens the file in place of STDOUT and once the process continues, new output to STDOUT will instead be written to our capture file.

Take screenshot through SSH
When connected to a box via ssh you can do a quick screenshot of that box using this command. After that you can rscp it over to your box and look at it.

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