1) Create a pdf version of a manpage
man -t manpage | ps2pdf – filename.pdf
Quick and dirty version. I made a version that checks if a manpage exists (but it’s not a oneliner). You must have ps2pdf and of course Ghostscript installed in your box.
Enhancements appreciated :-)
2) Bind a key with a command
bind -x '"\C-l":ls -l'the -x option is for binding to a shell command
3) Use file(1) to view device information
file -s /dev/sd*
file(1) can print details about certain devices in the /dev/ directory (block devices in this example). This helped me to know at a glance the location and revision of my bootloader, UUIDs, filesystem status, which partitions were primaries / logicals, etc.. without running several commands.
See also:
file -s /dev/dm-* file -s /dev/cciss/*etc..
4) Single use vnc-over-ssh connection
ssh -f -L 5900:localhost:5900 your.ssh.server "x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0"; vinagre localhost:5900 This command
1. SSH into a machine
2. Tunnels VNC port to your local computer (“-L 5900:localhost:5900”)
3. Runs a single use vnc server (“x11vnc -safer -localhost -nopw -once -display :0”)
4. Goes into the background (“-f”)
5. Runs VNC viewer on the local computer connecting to the remote machine via the newly created SSH tunnel (“vinagre localhost:5900”)
5) Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
for i in ~/.adobe ~/.macromedia ; do ( rm $i/ -rf ; ln -s /dev/null $i ) ; done
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.
6) A child process which survives the parent’s death (for sure)
( command & )
* Open xterm (or konsole, …)
* Start xeyes with: ( xeyes & )
* Close the xterminal
The xeyes process should be still running.
7) Compare copies of a file with md5
cmp file1 file2
8) backup delicious bookmarks
curl --user login:password -o DeliciousBookmarks.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'
Useful script to backup all your delicious bookmarks. With decilicious shutting down soon , it could be useful
9) Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn’t have to mess around with core files.
The one downside is that it does smoosh your program’s stderr and stdout together.
10) back ssh from firewalled hosts
ssh -R 5497:127.0.0.1:22 -p 62220 user@public.ip
host B (you) redirects a modem port (62220) to his local ssh.
host A is a remote machine (the ones that issues the ssh cmd).
once connected port 5497 is in listening mode on host B.
host B just do a
ssh 127.0.0.1 -p 5497 -l user
and reaches the remote host’ssh. This can be used also for vnc and so on.
11) Rename HTML files according to their title tag
perl -wlne'/title>([^<]+)/i&&rename$ARGV,"$1.html"' *.html
The above one-liner could be run against all HTML files in a directory. It renames the HTML files based on the text contained in their title tag. This helped me in a situation where I had a directory containing thousands of HTML documents with meaningless filenames.
