Commands using cat (514)

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Rename files in batch

temporarily override alias of any command
say, someone has aliased ls to 'ls --color=always' and you want to temporarily override the alias (it does not override functions)

Remote Serial connection redirected over network using SSH
Requires software found at: http://lpccomp.bc.ca/remserial/ Remote [A] (with physical serial port connected to device) $./remserial -d -p 23000 -s "115200 raw" /dev/ttyS0 & Local [B] (running the program that needs to connect to serial device) Create a SSH tunnel to the remote server: $ssh -N -L 23000:localhost:23000 user@hostwithphysicalserialport Use the locally tunnelled port to connect the local virtual serial port to the remote real physical port: $./remserial -d -r localhost -p 23000 -l /dev/remser1 /dev/ptmx & Example: Running minicom on machine B using serial /dev/remser1 will actually connect you to whatever device is plugged into machine A's serial port /dev/ttyS0.

Append stdout and stderr to a file, and print stderr to the screen [bash]
Useful for cron jobs -- all output will be logged but only errors will cause email to be sent. NB the order of "2>&1" and ">> logfile" is important, it doesn't work if you reverse them (everything goes to the logfile, nothing left for tee).

Add thousand separator with sed, in a file or within pipe
Does not necessarily require a file to process, it can be used in a pipe as well: $ cat filename | sed -e :a -e 's/\(.*[0-9]\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)/\1,\2/;ta' I don't remember where I copy/pasted this from, I wish I credited the original author

Convert YAML to JSON
Converts YAML file to JSON. Note that you'll need to install PyYAML. Also some YAML data types (like dates) are not supported by JSON).

Stream the latest offering from your fave netcasts/podcasts
This is a quick line to stream in the latest offerings of your favorite netcasts/podcasts. You will need to have a file named netcast.txt in the directory you run this from. This file should have one and only one of your netcast's/podcst's url per line. When run the line grabs the offering on the top of the netcast/podcast stack and end it over , quietly, to vlc. Since I move around computers during the day I wanted an easy way to listen to my daily dose of news and such without having to worry about downloading to whatever machine I am on. This is just a quick grab and stream of whats current. Future plans... have the list of netcasts be read from the web. possibly an rss or such. I use greader so there might be a way to use it as the source so as not to have to muck with multiple lists

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

Use mtr to create a text file report
The report mode of mtr produces a text formated result of the mtr run using the number of ping cycles stated by the command. This text file could then be attached to an email with ease. I use this also without the ">" portion when writing email from within mutt using VI from the command mode with ":r !mtr --report --report-cycles 10 www.google.com" to actually input the same output in the body of an email.

Alias for lazy tmux create/reattach


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