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Remove old unused kernels from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 & Fedora 12/13
Install using yum install yum-utils Options include: --oldkernels Remove old kernel and kernel-devel packages --count=KERNELCOUNT Number of kernel packages to keep on the system (default 2) use package-cleanup --help for a complete list

Remove invalid key from the known_hosts file for the IP address of a host
Quick shortcut if you know the hostname and want to save yourself one step for looking up the IP address separately.

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
In my case it was actually like this...

Detect if we are running on a VMware virtual machine
If you run this command on a VMWare Virtual Machine, it will return the string "VMware Virtual Platform". If you run it on a physical machine, it will return nothing. Useful for having a script determine if it's running on a VM or not. Of course, you must have dmidecode installed for this to work. Try it this way in a script: ISVM=$(dmidecode | awk '/VMware Virtual Platform/ {print $3,$4,$5}') Then test if $ISVM has text in it, or is blank.

find geographical location of an ip address
I save this to bin/iptrace and run "iptrace ipaddress" to get the Country, City and State of an ip address using the http://ipadress.com service. I add the following to my script to get a tinyurl of the map as well: URL=`lynx -dump http://www.ip-adress.com/ip_tracer/?QRY=$1|grep details|awk '{print $2}'` lynx -dump http://tinyurl.com/create.php?url=$URL|grep tinyurl|grep "19. http"|awk '{print $2}'

Get video information with ffmpeg

Display all readline binding that use CTRL
Useful for getting to know the available keyboard shortcuts.

Detect encoding of a text file
This command gives you the charset of a text file, which would be handy if you have no idea of the encoding.

Viewing Top Processes according to cpu, mem, swap size, etc.
I've wanted this for a long time, finally just sat down and came up with it. This shows you the sorted output of ps in a pretty format perfect for cron or startup scripts. You can sort by changing the k -vsz to k -pmem for example to sort by memory instead. If you want a function, here's one from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html $ aa_top_ps(){ local T N=${1:-10};T=${2:-vsz}; ps wwo pid,user,group,vsize:8,size:8,sz:6,rss:6,pmem:7,pcpu:7,time:7,wchan,sched=,stat,flags,comm,args k -${T} -A|sed -u "/^ *PID/d;${N}q"; }

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.


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