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ncdu - ncurses disk usage
ncdu is a text-mode ncurses-based disk usage analyzer. Useful for when you want to see where all your space is going. For a single flat directory it isn't more elaborate than an du|sort or some such thing, but this analyzes all directories below the one you specify so space consumed by files inside subdirectories is taken into account. This way you get the full picture. Features: file deletion, file size or size on disk and refresh as contents change. Homepage: http://dev.yorhel.nl/ncdu

find the biggest files recursively, no matter how many
This command will find the biggest files recursively under a certain directory, no matter if they are too many. If you try the regular commands ("find -type f -exec ls -laSr {} +" or "find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 ls -laSr") the sorting won't be correct because of command line arguments limit. This command won't use command line arguments to sort the files and will display the sorted list correctly.

Monitoring file handles used by a particular process
-r : repeat mode

Watch active calls on an Asterisk PBX
Only the number of calls nothing else.

Add prefix onto filenames
Best to try first with -n flag, to preview

Convert .wma files to .ogg with ffmpeg

Install an mpkg from the command line on OSX
Installing most OSX apps is just a matter of dropping it in /Applications, either GUI-wise or with cp -r. However, many packages are distributed in "mpkg" format, and those have to be installed with an installer. If you don't want to go to the trouble of firing up VNC to install an mpkg, you can use the "installer" command. This will install an application from a .mpkg it to /Applications system-wide. To install a program for just one user, replace "-target /" with "-target username".

get a rough estimate about how much disk space is used by all the currently installed debian packages
The vaule is expressed in megabytes

Find the real procesor speed when you use CPU scaling [cpuspeed]
We don't use CPU scaling, but just in case you do, there is something interesting to note. If you look at the /proc/cpuinfo, the speed listed is current running speed of the processors and not the real speed of the chip.

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.


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