Find out your UUID for an attached drive

For quite some time now the likes of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions have used UUID to determine any attached storage devices for mounting, for many of us whilst we see the value of such things finding out how the UUID is derived or for that matter checking the UUID is a bit of a mystery. Well rest easy because by using the command below can can quickly and easily find out this information yourself.

#> sudo blkid

Clever control sequence for pre-used console commands

You know how it is, you open a new terminal window assured you know the command you want to use you make a cup of coffee and then you forget the command you where to use. Obviously you need better coffee!

Or you can press the "Control Key + r" and your command prompt is replaced with this

(reverse-i-search)`':

What On Earth is Grep

As a tool "grep" is just one of those commands that once you begin to use you just can't do without, nothing in it name suggests what this command does. Grep Wikipedia documents grep as a command line text search utility originally written for Unix. The name is taken from the first letters in global / regular expression / print, a series of instructions for the ed text editor.

Converting "Mixed Case" filenames to "Lower Case"

Just a head's up on a pretty cool site that I came across today: Command-Line-Fu

Removing Deleted Files from your Trash

Have you ever deleted files to your "Recycle Bin" or if you prefer "Trash" only to find you cannot use "Empty Deleted Items" observing that permissions prevent you from deleting all the files or folders your bin contains.

 

Tar file archiver and compression utility

In computing, tar (derived from tape archive) is both a file format (in the form of a type of archive bitstream) and the name of the program used to handle such files. Initially developed as a raw format, used for tape backup and other sequential access devices for backup purposes, it is now commonly used to collate collections of files into one larger file, for distribution or archiving, while preserving file system information such as user and group permissions, dates, and directory structures.

The problem

Whilst trying out new Conky config files on Crunchbang Linux (wiki to follow about this) I had a few problems that turned out to be fonts that were needed that I did not have installed.
A quick web search later and the fonts were downloaded, but how do I install them so the system knows about them??

Espeak A Very Easy and Powerful Festival Alternative

Festival for many years has been the mother of all vocabulary text to speech systems available however it is complex to install especially if you need other voices. Espeak takes the pain out of installation that can challenge the most accomplished or seasoned Linux user. Ubuntu comes with Espeak pre-installed and even if this is not installed it only takes seconds to do so, unlike festival which takes many minutes.

Compressed Files and Image Mounting

Burn any Bootable CD from a file and you may come across something called an ISO it can also be known by other format types such as one or more of the following, this by know means is a definitive list.

* BIN/CUE
* BWT, BWI, BWS, BWA
* CCD
* CIF from Adaptec Easy CD Creator
* CSO (.cso)
* DAA (.daa)
* LCD from CDSpace
* MDF/MDS (.mdf)
* NRG (.nrg) (Nero Disk Image)
* DMG (Apple disk image) (.dmg)
* UIF (Universal Image Format) (.uif)
* IMA (.ima)