Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

Normally, searching git log comments is case sensitive. The -i luckily applies to the --grep switch.

Useful for when you download movies split into < 700mb parts. Credit to rich @ http://superuser.com/questions/318640/merge-avi-files-without-recoding-in-mac-os-x-lion mencoder is generally included with mplayer. MacPorts: sudo port install mplayer Show Sample Output

Remove the "echo" to actually archive. Many similar commands are found on commandlinefu but I end up needing this very specific one from time to time. To extract any of them, use the standard tar.bz2 extract command: tar xvjf folder1.tar.bz2 Show Sample Output

Can't remember what that one package was called? Search for it! It's also a good idea to run apt-get update first. Show Sample Output

converts RAW files from a Nikon DSLR to jpg for easy viewing etc. requires ufraw package

pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable. Basically the opposite of: ping -a server-or-ip.com which would beep when a server IS reachable. You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a: while true; do [ "$(ping -c1W1w1 server-or-ip.com 2>/dev/null | awk '/received/ {print $4}')" = 1 ] && date || echo 'server is down!'; sleep 1; done which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo. Notes: Requires beep package. May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker) Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box... sudo apt-get install beep

Seems obvious, but other seemingly simple ways to use it don't work: echo !whammy and echo "!whammy" both output: -bash: !whammy: event not found and this: echo "\!whammy" outputs: \!whammy with the slash :( you can also do any combinations of quotes for a complex string: echo "It's great to be able to use a bang ("'!'") in a command"'!' outputs: It's great to be able to use a bang (!) in a command! Show Sample Output

Most people know that you can run a PHP script from the command line like so: php ./my_script.php But sometimes I just want to run a quick bit of code, the PHP Command Line Interface allows me to do so with the -r option. Requires package php5-cli Show Sample Output

rsyncs files to a server excluding listed files also a file can be used to exclude common exclude rules and/or to exclude a ton of files, like so: rsync --exclude-from '~/.scripts/exclude.txt' where exclude.txt has one rule per line: *.mp3 *.svn*

Works for most distributions, tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo, SUSE, RedHat. Debian and Slackware: cat /etc/*version Show Sample Output