Commands by lostangel (0)

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Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

Extract multiple tar files at once in zsh
tar doesn't support wildcard for unpacking (so you can't use tar -xf *.tar) and it's shorter and simpler than for i in *.tar;do tar -xf $i;done (or even 'for i in *.tar;tar -xf $i' in case of zsh) -i says tar not to stop after first file (EOF)

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files

Delete all but the latest 5 files
yes 6 (tail from 6th line)

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Continuously listen on a port and respond with a fixed message with netcat (and respond to kill signals)
`while true`: do forever `nc -l -p 4300 -c 'echo hello'`: this is the but anything can go here really `test $? -gt 0 && break`: this checks the return code for ctrl^c or the like and quite the loop, otherwise in order to kill the loop you'd have to get the parent process id and kill it.

(Debian/Ubuntu) Discover what package a file belongs to
Works similar to dpkg -S, but uses the locatedb and is thus inarguably a lot faster - if the locatedb is current.

List directories recursively showing its sizes using only ls and grep
ls -lhR Lists everithing using -l "long listing format" wich includes the space used by the folder. Displays it in -h "human readable form" (i.e. 2.2G, 32K), and -R recurses subfolders. grep -e using a regex, show lines containing the word "total" or a ":" at the end of the line (those with the name of the folder) only.

List .log files open by a pid
Uses lsof to display the full path of ".log" files opened by a specified PID.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

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