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Hide the name of a process listed in the `ps` output
$ exec -a $NAME $COMMAND $ARGS `your_cmd -erase_all_files` is the real process, but harmless-looking getty appears in the process table. Never actually had a need to do this, but interesting nonetheless... Tested in bash, dash. $ -a $NAME "pass NAME as the zeroth argument to COMMAND", i.e. customise the name of the process (as commonly seen with `ps`)

Run the Firefox Profile Manager
even when another instance is already open. Great for testing purposes when you need to be 2 people at once on the same site.

distribution specific information

view hex mode in vim

Greets the user appropriately

Get disk quota usage openvz using vzlist
OpenVZ: Get disk quota usage for your VEID

Recursively list all of the files in a directory, group them by extension and calculate the average of the file sizes in each group
Here's an annotated version of the command, using full-names instead of aliases. It is exactly equivalent to the short-hand version. # Recursively list all the files in the current directory. Get-ChildItem -Recurse | # Filter out the sub-directories themselves. Where-Object { return -not $_.PsIsContainer; } | # Group the resulting files by their extensions. Group-Object Extension | # Pluck the Name and Count properties of each group and define # a custom expression that calculates the average of the sizes # of the files in that group. # The back-tick is a line-continuation character. Select-Object ` Name, Count, @{ Name = 'Average'; Expression = { # Average the Length (sizes) of the files in the current group. return ($_.Group | Measure-Object -Average Length).Average; } } | # Format the results in a tabular view, automatically adjusted to # widths of the values in the columns. Format-Table -AutoSize ` @{ # Rename the Name property to something more sensible. Name = 'Extension'; Expression = { return $_.Name; } }, Count, @{ # Format the Average property to display KB instead of bytes # and use a formatting string to show it rounded to two decimals. Name = 'Average Size (KB)'; # The "1KB" is a built-in constant which is equal to 1024. Expression = { return $_.Average / 1KB }; FormatString = '{0:N2}' }

Rsync a directory excluding pesky .svn dirs

Adhoc tar backup
Creates a quick backup with tar to a remote host over ssh.

Top ten (or whatever) memory utilizing processes (with children aggregate)
This command loops over all of the processes in a system and creates an associative array in awk with the process name as the key and the sum of the RSS as the value. The associative array has the effect of summing a parent process and all of it's children. It then prints the top ten processes sorted by size.


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