Commands by thrifus (3)

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Generate MD5 of string and output only the hash checksum in a readable format
Generates the md5 hash, without the trailing " -" and with the output "broken" into pairs of hexs.

Unrar multiple directories into current working directory
Grabs all rar files in any current subdirectories and feeds it to unrar. Doesn't work well with things packaged like file.part01.rar. Works best with File.rar. You can recurse into other directories by adding more /*'s

RTFM function
Some commands have more information on 'info' than in the man pages

pinky - user info
Gives information about user's home directory and real name and shell user is having.

List the Sizes of Folders and Directories

Check motherboard manufacturer, product name, version and serial number
Very slick way to check your motherboard manufacturer, product name, version and serial number.

Top ten (or whatever) memory utilizing processes (with children aggregate)
This command loops over all of the processes in a system and creates an associative array in awk with the process name as the key and the sum of the RSS as the value. The associative array has the effect of summing a parent process and all of it's children. It then prints the top ten processes sorted by size.

Calculates the date 2 weeks ago from Saturday the specified format.
Good for automating reports that need to run from between two dates.

Extracting a range of pages from a PDF, using GhostScript
In this example we extract pages 14-17

Is it a terminal?
Oddly, the isatty(3) glibc C call doesn't have a direct analogue as a command 'isatty(1)'. All is not lost as you can use test(1). For example, your script might be run from a tty or from a GUI menu item but it needs to get user-input or give feedback. Now your script can test STDIN with 'isatty 0' or STDOUT with 'isatty 1' and use xmessage(1) if the tty is not available. The other way to test for this is with 'tty -s' - but that's only for STDIN.


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