Commands by brettalton (5)

  • Convert PNG to GIF

    (relies on 'imagemagick') Convert all .png files to .gif. This can also go the other way if you reverse the file extensions in the command, e.g.: for file in *.gif; do convert "$file" "$(basename $file .gif).png"; done If the file is named 'example1.png' it will be named 'example1.gif' when it is complete.


    4
    for file in *.png; do convert "$file" "$(basename $file .png).gif"; done
    brettalton · 2009-02-15 23:39:08 15
  • Convert PDF to JPG

    (relies on 'imagemagick') This command will convert all .pdf files in a directory into a 800px (wide or height, whichever is smaller) image (with the aspect ratio kept) .jpg. If the file is named 'example1.pdf' it will be named 'example1.jpg' when it is complete. This is a VERY worthwhile command! People pay hundreds of dollars for this in the Windows world. My .jpg files average between 150kB to 300kB, but your's may differ. Show Sample Output


    29
    for file in `ls *.pdf`; do convert -verbose -colorspace RGB -resize 800 -interlace none -density 300 -quality 80 $file `echo $file | sed 's/\.pdf$/\.jpg/'`; done
    brettalton · 2009-02-15 23:27:43 20
  • Extract .daa files with PowerISO

    .daa is a non-standard disk image format that can not be read by any other program. This is how you can extract the files though. PowerISO binary for Linux: http://www.poweriso.com/poweriso-1.3.tar.gz "This is a free utility for linux which can extract, list, and convert image files (including ISO, BIN, DAA, and other formats). Type " poweriso -? " for detailed usage information. File Size: 278KB"


    -2
    ./poweriso extract $USER/file.daa / -od $USER/file_extracted
    brettalton · 2009-02-15 23:19:40 10
  • View your motherboard's ACPI tables (in Debian & Ubuntu)

    In July 2008, there was an uproar over Foxconn motherboards feeding Linux installs incorrect ACPI information (http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249). Foxconn has gladly corrected their mistake, but make sure it's not happening on your motherboard! After running the command, just view the 'dsdt.dsl' in any editor you like. Show Sample Output


    -1
    sudo aptitude -y install iasl && sudo cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt.dat && iasl -d dsdt.dat
    brettalton · 2009-02-15 23:13:50 13
  • Concatenate (join) video files

    Use mencoder to concatenate (join) multiple video files together. Show Sample Output


    9
    mencoder -forceidx -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi video1.avi video2.avi
    brettalton · 2009-02-15 23:05:32 13

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Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code
I have a bash alias for this command line and find it useful for searching C code for error messages. The -H tells grep to print the filename. you can omit the -i to match the case exactly or keep the -i for case-insensitive matching. This find command find all .c and .h files

List your installed Chromium extensions (with url to each page)
Gives you a list for all installed chrome (chromium) extensions with URL to the page of the extension. With this you can easy add a new Bookmark folder called "extensions" add every URL to that folder, so it will be synced and you can access the names from every computer you are logged in. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Only tested with chromium, for chrome you maybe have to change the find $PATH.

Convert Squid unixtime logs in human-readable ones
On-the-fly conversion of Unix Time to human-readable in Squid's access.log

Recursively remove all empty directories

Run a command multiple times with different subcommands
it's nice to be able to use the command `ls program.{h,c,cpp}`. This expands to `ls program.h program.c program.cpp`. Note: This is a text expansion, not a shell wildcard type expansion that looks at matching file names to calculate the expansion. More details at http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/bash-brace-expansion I often run multiple commands (like apt-get) one after the other with different subcommands. Just for fun this wraps the whole thing into a single line that uses brace expansion.

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

sed /pat/!d without using sed (no RE; limited to shell patterns aka globbing)
POSIX requires this "string truncating" functionality. might as well use it, at least for very small tasks where invoking sed and using RE is overkill.

Silently ensures that a FS is mounted on the given mount point (checks if it's OK, otherwise unmount, create dir and mount)
In my example, the mount point is /media/mpdr1 and the FS is /dev/sdd1 /mountpoint-path = /media/mpdr1 filesystem=/dev/sdd1 Why this command ? Well, in fact, with some external devices I used to face some issues : during data transfer from the device to the internal drive, some errors occurred and the device was unmounted and remounted again in a different folder. In such situations, the command mountpoint gave a positive result even if the FS wasn't properly mounted, that's why I added the df part. And if the device is not properly mounted, the command tries to unmount, to create the folder (if it exists already it will also work) and finally mount the FS on the given mount point.

List all databases in Postgres and their (byte/human) sizes, ordering by byte size descending
Get a listing of all of your databases in Postgres and their sizes, ordering by the largest size first. Requires that you give the -d parameter a valid database name that you can connect to.

print a python-script (or any other code) with syntax-highlighting and no loss of indentation

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