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

Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file
Imagine you've started a long-running process that involves piping data, but you forgot to add the progress-bar option to a command. e.g. $ xz -dc bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program > summary . This command uses lsof to see how much data xz has read from the file. $ lsof -o0 -o -Fo FILENAME Display offsets (-o), in decimal (-o0), in parseable form (-Fo) This will output something like: . p12607 f3 o0t45187072 . Process id (p), File Descriptor (f), Offset (o) . We stat the file to get its size $ stat -c %s FILENAME . Then we plug the values into awk. Split the line at the letter t: -Ft Define a variable for the file's size: -s=$(stat...) Only work on the offset line: /^o/ . Note this command was tested using the Linux version of lsof. Because it uses lsof's batch option (-F) it may be portable. . Thanks to @unhammer for the brilliant idea.

Number of CPU's in a system
This appears to do the same. Utility is verified to be present on Ubuntu and OpenSuse out-of-the-box.

Use colordiff in side-by-side mode, and with automatic column widths.
Barely worth posting because it is so simple, but I use it literally all the time. I was always frustrated by the limitations that a non-gui environment imposes on diff'ing files. This fixes some of those limitations by colourising the output (you'll have to install colordiff, but it is just a wrapper for diff itself), using side-by-side mode for clearer presentation, and of course, the -W parameter, using tput to automatically insert you terminal width. Note that the double quotes aren't necessary if typed into terminal as-is. I included them for safety sake,

list files recursively by size

Get curenttly playing track in Last.fm radio

Change the ownership of all files owned by one user.
Finds all files in /home owned by UID 1056 and changes to 2056.

Terminal Keyboard Shortcut list
This command will give you a list of available keyboard shortcuts according to stty.

Shows you how many hours of avi video you have.
midentify.sh is part of mplayer, but you might have to locate it on your box.

combining streams
2>&1 permit to combinate stdout and stderr. grep will catch stderr and stdout instead of stdout only.


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