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a fast way to repeat output a byte
the speed is about 500MB/s on my machine. i think it's fast enough to output not too many bytes. while a C program may output 1GB per sencond on my machine. if the size is not the power of 512,you may change the bs and count in dd.

Updated top ten memory utilizing processes (child/instance aggregation) now with percentages of total RAM
Prints the top 10 memory consuming processes (with children and instances aggregated) sorted by total RSS and calculates the percentage of total RAM each uses. Please note that since RSS can include shared libraries it is possible for the percentages to add up to more that the total amount of RAM, but this still gives you a pretty good idea. Also note that this does not work with the mawk version of awk, but it works fine with GNU Awk which is on most Linux systems. It also does not work on OS X.

print character classes
Today I needed a way to print various character classes to use as input for a program I was writing. Also a nice way to visualize character classes.

(Debian/Ubuntu) Discover what package a file belongs to
Works similar to dpkg -S, but uses the locatedb and is thus inarguably a lot faster - if the locatedb is current.

Uniformly correct filenames in a directory
Useful if non-ascii characters in filenames have been improperly encoded. Replace "PROBLEM" with the incorrect characters (e.g. 'é'), and "FIX" with the correct ones (e.g. '?').

Add a line to a file using sudo
This is the solution to the common mistake made by sudo newbies, since $ sudo echo "foo bar" >> /path/to/some/file does NOT add to the file as root. Alternatively, $ sudo echo "foo bar" > /path/to/some/file should be replaced by $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee /path/to/some/file And you can add a >/dev/null in the end if you're not interested in the tee stdout : $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee -a /path/to/some/file >/dev/null

Encrypted archive with openssl and tar
command to decrypt: $ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -d < secret.tar.enc | tar x Of course, don't forget to rm the original files ;) You may also want to look at the openssl docs for more options.

Both view and pipe the file without saving to disk
This is a cool trick to view the contents of the file on /dev/pts/0 (or whatever terminal you're using), and also send the contents of that file to another program by way of an unnamed pipe. All the while, you've not bothered saving any extra data to disk, like you might be tempted to do with sed or grep to filter output.

Find ASCII files and extract IP addresses

Get the size of all the directories in current directory
OSX's BSD version of the du command uses the -d argument instead of --max-depth.


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