Commands using xargs (769)

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A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

a find and replace within text-based files, for batch text replacement, not using perl
Use sed to edit in-place a list of files returned by find.

Diff two directories by finding and comparing the md5 checksums of their contents.
Compute the md5 checksums for the contents of two mirrored directories, then sort and diff the results. If everything matches, nothing is returned. Otherwise, any checksums which do not match, or which exist in one tree but not the other, are returned. As you might imagine, the output is useful only if no errors are found, because only the checksums, not filenames, are returned. I hope to address this, or that someone else will!

connect via ssh using mac address
Instead of looking for the right ip address, just pick whatever address you like and set a static ip mapping.

Encoding from AVI to MPEG format
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-mpeg.html MEncoder can create MPEG (MPEG-PS) format output files. Usually, when you are using MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video, it is because you are encoding for a constrained format such as SVCD, VCD, or DVD. To change MEncoder's output file format, use the -of mpeg option. Creating an MPEG-1 file suitable to be played on systems with minimal multimedia support, such as default Windows installs: $ mencoder input.avi -of mpeg -mpegopts format=mpeg1:tsaf:muxrate=2000 \ -o output.mpg -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=224 -ovc lavc \ -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video:vbitrate=1152:keyint=15:mbd=2:aspect=4/3

List your MACs address

Leap year calculation

Output a list of svn repository entities to xml file
I use this to pull the last commit date for everything in my repo, so I can tell the client which files haven't been touched or updated since the repo was created. Another way to do it is to use svn log, but that does not pull the "kind" attribute. It does, however, give you the commit message. Both are very useful.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Extract title from HTML files
previous version leaves lots of blank lines


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