the place for useful commands, 1-liners, mini-howtos & snippets

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create tar.gz archiv

 tar -czvf myfiles.tar.gz /home/username/myfiles/

create tar.gz archiv of full system without

 tar cvpzf /mnt/somewhere/backup.tgz --exclude=/data --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys --exclude=/dev /

backup raw data of a disc (as root):

dd if=/dev/sdX | gzip -c9 > /PATH/TO/BACKUP.gz

restore to a drive of same size as original medium:

gunzip -c /PATH/TO/BACKUP.gz | dd of=/dev/sdX

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/backup_restore

mp3 “normalize” by id3 tag

mp3gain analyses sound files and saves an id3 volume metatag to them. many music-players can read that id3 tag and adjust the volume to that gain.

 find /path/to/music/ -type f -iname '*.mp3' -print0 | xargs -0 mp3gain -r -k

debian misses to enable this by default :( it enables a lot of auto complete for file paths, commands, command parameters(!) and more

 apt-get install bash-completion

add this to /etc/profile to enable completion for all users:

 if [ -f /etc/bash_completion ]; then
   . /etc/bash_completion
 fi

enable it by opening a new console or

 source /etc/profile

info from: http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-add-bash-completion-in-debian

count is in KiB

dd bs=1024 count=1000 </dev/urandom >myfile  

export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8; export LANG=en_US.UTF-8; export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8; locale-gen en_US.UTF-8