Under given commands are very useful and helpful to any system administrator to accomplish some very basic tasks easily.
Clone a Hard Drive
DD is one the most simplistic and powerful image applications out there.
dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb
Burn an ISO to a CD
Why open any image writer software program just to burn an ISO? Map this command to an alias and get burning.
cdrecord -v speed=8 dev=0,0,0 name_of_iso_file.iso
Note: You need to get the info for the “dev=” part by running “cdrecord –scanbus”
Video Conversions
Let’s say you want to convert an AVI to an Mpeg file:
ffmpeg -i video_origine.avi video_finale.mpg
Or convert an Mpeg to AVI:
ffmpeg -i video_origine.mpg video_finale.avi
There are all sorts of things you can do with ffmpeg.
Adding a Drop Shadow to an Image
I found myself spending a ton of time adding drop shadows to images. Using a simple command I was able to create drop shadows in seconds.
convert screenshot.jpg ( +clone -background black -shadow 60×5+0+5 ) +swap -background white -layers merge +repage shadow.jpg
Note: You must have Imagemagick installed for this command to work. Debian/Ubuntu users can use apt-get install imagemagick.
Splice Together an MP3
If you want simple MP3 splicing this command has your back:
cat 1.mp3 2.mp3 > combined.mp3
Replace Words in a Text File
No need to open up a GUI text editor when you have sed.
This command from Eric’s blog will replace all instances of a color in CSS with another one.
sed ’s/#FF0000/#0000FF/g’ main.css
Resizing images
Unless you are doing some sort of cropping there is no reason to load up Photoshop or the Gimp. A simple command will usually suffice for almost all your image resizing needs.
convert -resize 300 image.jpg image-small.jpg
If you finding yourself doing lots of image resizing during the day, this command could potentially save you a LOT of time. You can even do mass image resizing.
