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Quickly add a new user to all groups the default user is in
This is a standard procedure for me, whenever I set up a new Raspberry Pi system. Because the default user is "pi", I quickly replace it with my own (e.g. "kostis"), but I have to substitute that user to all of pi's groups first, before deleting the default account. xargs helps a lot with that in a single line, while avoiding boring "for" loops. For everything trickier, there's always "parallel" :)

"Clone" a list of installed packages from one Debian/Ubuntu Server to another

List files with full path

ssh tunnel with auto reconnect ability

Get all ip address for the host

Show me a histogram of the busiest minutes in a log file:
Busiest seconds: $ cat /var/log/secure.log | awk '{print substr($0,0,15)}' | uniq -c | sort -nr | awk '{printf("\n%s ",$0) ; for (i = 0; i

find files ignoring .svn and its decendents
for when find . -print | grep -v .svn | xargs doesnt cut it.

Show used disk space:

Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)
Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

save stderr only to a file
taken from http://www.unix.com/shell-programming-scripting/158311-how-tee-stderr.html " What does it mean? The redirection operator n>&m makes file descriptor n to be a copy of file descriptor m. So, whe are: - Opening a new file descriptor, 3, that is a copy of file descriptor 1, the standard output; - Making file descriptor 1 a copy of file descriptor 2, the standard error output; - Making file descriptor 2 to be a copy of file descriptor 3 (the "backup" of the standard output) in a short: we swapped the standard output and the standard error output. "


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