Some people might encounter the experience that they can't view a pdf file they want from a terminal when no GUI is available. This is when pdftotext comes in handy. This utility allows you to export a pdf file to a plain text format and view from any text editor. It also allows you to export only certain parts of the pdf file. [
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I have compiled a list of useful linux commands for day to day operation.
make a pdf of a manual page
user@www$ man -t man | ps2pdf - > man.pdf
Run a low priority command
user@www$ nice <command>
Go to previous directory
user@www$ cd -
Go to dir, execute command and return to current dir
user@www$ (cd dir && command)
Make compressed archive of dir/
user@www$ tar -c dir/ | bzip2 > dir.tar.bz2
Extract archive (use gzip instead of bzip2 for tar.gz files)
user@www$ bzip2 -dc dir.tar.bz2 | tar -x
Display a calendar for a particular month year
user@www$ cal 9 2008
What date is it this friday.
user@www$ date -d fri
What day does xmas fall on, this year
user@www$ date --date='25 Dec' +%A
Convert seconds since the epoch (1970-01-01 UTC) to date
user@www$ date --date='@2147483647'
Email reminder
user@www$ echo "mail -s 'reminder' user@address.com < /dev/null" | at 20:00
Show name and version of distribution
user@www$ head -n1 /etc/issue
Show all partitions registered on the system
user@www$ cat /proc/partitions
Download url at 1AM to current dir
user@www$ echo 'wget url' | at 01:00
You can find more commands from
Linux Commands - A Practical Reference.
Or more on
Top 10 Best Cheat Sheets for Linux Commands [
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When you are viewing text files using more/less command, sometimes you would like to edit that particular file directly using vi without going back to shell and fire up another command. You can do that easily by doing the following. [
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pdfimages is a PDF image extractor utility/tool under Linux operating system. It can extract images from PDF file and save them under either Portable Pixmap(PPM), Portable Bitmap(PBM) or JPEG/JPG files. This utility should be installed by default in Ubuntu Hardy, at least it is the case in my installation. If not, you can run the following command to install the utility tools: [
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A program called unrar is used to uncompress a .rar archive file in Linux. It is not installed by default in Ubuntu. To install it, simply run the command:
sudo apt-get install unrar
You will get
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
unrar
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 96.9kB of archives.
After this operation, 246kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://au.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse unrar 1:3.7.8-1 [96.9kB]
Fetched 96.9kB in 2s (34.9kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package unrar.
(Reading database ... 117487 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking unrar (from .../unrar_1%3a3.7.8-1_i386.deb) ...
Setting up unrar (1:3.7.8-1) ...
You can see that it requires the multiverse repository. So if your installation complains something, try to update your source.list first.
To unrar .rar files, simply use command:
user@www$ unrar x <filename.rar>
See the man page for more options:
user@www$ man unrar
Have fun.... [
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