Linux Commands

There are so many great little utilities in Linux. I made this page to help me remember my favorites.

Mercurial "Dummy" Merge

• hg --config ui.merge=internal:local merge #keep my files
• hg --config ui.merge=internal:other merge #keep their files

Convert latex document to HTML

• latex2html -split 0 doc.tex doc.html

Merge multiple PDFs into a single document

• gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=merged.pdf -dBATCH *.pdf

Start a webserver from any directory

• python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

Wake up to music

• echo "banshee --play" | at 7:00am

Random integer between 0 and X

• echo $(($RANDOM%X)) #X < 32768

Resize an image [requires ImageMagick]

• convert original.jpg -resize 50% resized.jpg
• convert original.jpg -size 320x150 resized.jpg

IP Address Lookups

• dig www.google.com
• dig @4.2.2.1 www.google.com

Sleep Timer

• echo 'gnome-power-cmd suspend' | at now + 10 minutes

Text to Speech

• echo $@ | text2wave | aplay

Convert a .flv movie to .mp3 [requires ffmpeg and lame]

• ffmpeg -i "flv_filename" -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ab 192k -vn -y "output.wav"; lame --preset cd "output.wav" "$output.mp3"; rm "output.wav"

Show processes sorted by I/O usage [requires iotop]

• iotop

Uncompress (tar, 7z, zip, rar, etc) [requires unp]

• unp archive.tar
• unp *.zip

Bandwidth log [requires vnstat]

• vnstat -d #daily usage
• vnstat -m #monthly usage