youtube-dl: download youtube videos in Ubuntu using command line

If you use Ubuntu (or other Linux distribution) and you wish to download some video from youtube.com into .flv file you can try using youtube-dl command line utility. It just downloads videos without any online applications, converters or etc. Type the following command in terminal to get it installed: sudo apt-get install youtube-dl Let’s imagine you would like to download the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2leg8mUE9rs (this is part of Military Parade [...]

Read more →

 

16 GB encrypted candy file

Update: as far as cryptoloop is vulnerable and is not maintained I don’t recommend using below approach for creating encrypted for for those of you who require strong security. Use truecrypt to create encrypted filesystem within a file instead. Today it came to my mind that it is time to make sensitive information stored on my usb flash drive encrypted but still transportable and easy to use. But I don’t want [...]

Read more →

 

Tiny bash scripts: check Internet connection availability

Sometimes it is necessary to check whether server you want to run some big bash script is connected to Internet. Usually it makes sense while running scripts periodically using cron.  Below is the tiny bash script for this purpose: #!/bin/bash WGET=”/usr/bin/wget” $WGET -q –tries=10 –timeout=5 http://www.google.com -O /tmp/index.google &> /dev/null if [ ! -s /tmp/index.google ];then echo “no” else echo “yes” fi As you see it tries to download google’s [...]

Read more →

 

Another 10 good Unix habits to pickup

Well, IBM publishes a new article about useful Unix command line habits as a follow-up to Michael Stutz’s article. I promise that after reading this article you will say something like “A-ha, I didn’t know you could do that!” Here is the part of that staff: The !$ command returns the last argument used with a command. But what happens if you have a command that used arguments and you [...]

Read more →

 

Comparing Bash with... Windows command line shell...

You may already be known that Microsoft claims that Windows PowerShell (comes with its Vista by default) script language helps IT professionals achieve greater control and productivity and to accelerate the automation during system administration process. As a non-Windows but *nix systems administrator/engineer I was always interested if it is possible to access those functions and objects we can easily get in Bash (of course we are talking about each [...]

Read more →