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gzip over ssh
I've kept the gzip compression at a low level, but depending on the cpu power available on the source machine you may want to increase it. However, SQL compresses really well, and I found even with -1 I was able to transfer 40 MiB/s over a 100 mbps wire, which was good enough for me.

Symlink all files from a base directory to a target directory

copy working directory and compress it on-the-fly while showing progress
What happens here is we tell tar to create "-c" an archive of all files in current dir "." (recursively) and output the data to stdout "-f -". Next we specify the size "-s" to pv of all files in current dir. The "du -sb . | awk ?{print $1}?" returns number of bytes in current dir, and it gets fed as "-s" parameter to pv. Next we gzip the whole content and output the result to out.tgz file. This way "pv" knows how much data is still left to be processed and shows us that it will take yet another 4 mins 49 secs to finish. Credit: Peteris Krumins http://www.catonmat.net/blog/unix-utilities-pipe-viewer/

Generate random password on Mac OS X
Feel free to put this in your ~/.profile: $ random(){ cat /dev/urandom | env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc $1 | head -c $2; echo; } Then use it to generate passwords: $ random [:alnum:] 16 Or DNA sequences: $ random ACGT 256

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Clear current session history (bash)

See entire packet payload using tcpdump.
This command will show you the entire payload of a packet. The final "s" increases the snaplength, grabbing the whole packet.

Display disk partition sizes
It is the same but more faster real 0m0,007s user 0m0,011s sys 0m0,000s with my solution real 0m0,038s user 0m0,044s sys 0m0,000s with your solution :)

resolve short urls
since the most url shorteners respond with a header containing the Location: ... this works with most common shorteners

Remove all zero size files from current directory (not recursive)


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