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Remove any RPMs matching a pattern
This should be an option to rpm, but isn't. I wind up using it a lot because I always forget the full name of the packages I want to delete.

Mount a VMware virtual disk (.vmdk) file on a Linux box
Assumes XP/2000/2003. For Server 2008+ try offset=105,906,176 You can find this number in the System Information utility under Partition Starting Offset. UEFI based boxes you want partition 2 since the first is just the boot files (and FAT). This works with (storage side) snapshots which is handy for single file restores on NFS mounted VMware systems

File rotation without rename command
Rotates log files with "gz"-extension in a directory for 7 days and enumerates the number in file name. i.e.: logfile.1.gz > logfile.2.gz I needed this line due to the limitations on AIX Unix systems which do not ship with the rename command.

How to secure delete a file
Instead, install apt-get install secure-delete and you can use: -- srm to delete file and directory on hard disk -- smem to delete file in RAM -- sfill to delete "free space" on hard disk -- sswap to delete all data from swap

Picture Renamer
jhead is a very nice tool to do all sorts of things with photographs, in a batch-oriented way. It has a specific function to rename files based on dates, and the format I used above was just an example.

Tail a log file with long lines truncated
This truncates any lines longer than 80 characters. Also useful for looking at different parts of the line, e.g. cut -b 50-100 shows columns 50 through 100.

list txt files order by time
list all txt files order by time, newest first

Insert a comment on command line for reminder
Comments can be used directly on the command line so I can save in the history a brief description of what command does.

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Get the total length of all videos in the current dir in H:m:s
You're behind on your TV catch-up, but how far behind? This command tries to open mplayer against all files in the current dir. If it's a video file it will contain ID_LENGTH, which is summed and output in hours, minutes and seconds. Someone better at awk could probably reduce this down a lot.


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