Cheat Monk

Convert Videos to MP4 Playable on iTunes/iPhone/iPad

Code Monk — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:08:31 +0000

ffmpeg -i original-file.avi -r 30 -vcodec libx264 -threads 0 -ar 48000 -ab 128k -ac 2 -y -crf 21 converted_file.mp4

Split A Big File Into Multiple TAR Files

Code Monk — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 20:26:46 +0000

So you have a big archive or big file that you can’t fit on a single storage (are there still such things that does not fit onto a USB these days? ). How do you split them up on Linux?

tar czvfp - /your/one/big/file-or-archive | split -d -b 102400000 - multifile-prefix

The result would be files like multifile-prefix00 .. multifile-prefixNN.

You can then put them back together with:

cat multifile-prefix* | tar xzvfp -

Nevertheless, go buy yourself bigger USB drives!

Process Monitor and Email Alert In One Line

Code Monk — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:43:57 +0000

ps aux|grep PROCESSNAME > /dev/null; if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "Process is not running!" | mail -s "ALERT: Process is not running" alert@yourdomain.com; fi

Substitute PROCESSNAME with the name of the daemon or script you want to monitor. This is good if you have a long running script that you want to be alerted of when it finishes (you can do more within the then clause of the if construct). It is best run from cron, perhaps every 5 mins, something like:

*/5 * * * * ps aux|grep PROCESSNAME > /dev/null; if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "Process is not running!" | mail -s "ALERT: Process is not running" alert@yourdomain.com; fi

Copy and Uncompress (ssh, gunzip, tar) from Remote Server

Code Monk — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 08:03:06 +0000

So you have a remote backup and you want to quickly have it restored locally or to another server without transferring, then uncompressing as 2 or 3 steps.

ssh user@remote-server "cat /path/to/compressed/backup.tar.gz" | tar xzvf -

Find Out Which Repository an RPM is Installed From

Code Monk — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 03:02:30 +0000

You might be wondering which an rpm package came from. When yum info will list “installed” instead of which repository, well here is a one liner that can help:

rpm -q gpg-pubkey --provides | grep `rpm -qi |grep Signature|awk '{print $(NF)}'|tail -1`

Here is a sample:
[root@vm-linux-01 ~]# rpm -q gpg-pubkey --provides | grep `rpm -qi mysql-server|grep Signature|awk '{print $(NF)}'|tail -1` gpg(Atomic Rocket Turtle ) = 4:32a951145ebd2744-418ffac9 gpg(5ebd2744) = 4:32a951145ebd2744-418ffac9

So we know that mysql-server came from the Atomic repo

Copy Large Files Over the Network with Netcat + tar + Qpress compression

Code Monk — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:38:13 +0000

On the target host, change directory to the folder you want to copy the files to:

nc -l 9999 | qpress -vdio | tar xvf -

On the source host, change directory to the folder containing the files to be copied:

tar -cf - . | qpress -vio - . | nc [TARGET_HOST_IP] 9999

Convert Videos to AVI Using mencoder 3-pass Method

Code Monk — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 02:57:16 +0000

Have you downloaded a video file you can’t play or you want to share but others will not be able to play? Convert them to AVI:

for i in 1 3 3; do mencoder /path/to/original-video -forceidx -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=$i -lameopts ratio=75 -oac mp3lame -o /path/to/desired-output.avi; done

List Distinct IPs on Your Apache Access Log

Code Monk — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 02:17:29 +0000

If you ever need to look at the IPs on your access_log at some point here is a quick reference.

cat access_log|awk '{print $1}'|sort|uniq -c

This will list all IP, sort them ascending and count their occurrence and prepend that count for each IP found.

Retrieve Plesk ‘admin’ Password on Windows

Code Monk — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:24:02 +0000

If you have forgotten access to your Plesk Control Panel and have physical or remote desktop access to your Windows server here’s how.

From the command prompt browse to you Plesk installation directory i.e. C:\Parallels\Plesk or C:\SWSoft\Plesk then issue the command:

admin\bin\plesksrvclient.exe -get

A popup should appear listing your password.

Find Large Files using `find` Command

Code Monk — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:47:15 +0000

Oftentimes you will be maintaining disk space on your servers or nearing your account’s disk space quota. Quickly you want to know which files are taking up your disk space, here’s a quick rundown to find files greater than 10MB.

find . -type f -size +10240k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

This will find files from your current working directory and list them alongside their corresponding sizes.