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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).

Reduce PDF size

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Ride another SSH agent
Must be done as root - will cause subsequent ssh connections to use the identities available via the [user]'s agent socket.

Get video information with ffmpeg
I used an flv in my example, but it'll work on any file ffmpeg supports. It says it wants an output file, but it tells what you want to know without one.

doing some floating point math

automount samba shares as devices in /mnt/
the middle command between the ; and ; is the vi commands that insert that line into the last line of the file, the esc with the carets is literally hitting the escape key, you have to have the smbfs package installed to do it, I use it to access my iTunes music on my mac from my linux PC's with amarok so I can play the music anywhere in the house. among other things, it allows you to access the files on that share from your computer anytime you're on that network.

Display a list of RPMs installed on a particular date
Find out which RPMs were installed on a particular date. These would (naturally) include update RPMs. This example shows searching for "Thu 05 Mar" (with grep). Alternatively, pipe it to less so you can search inside less (with less's neat text highlighting of the search term): rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} \"%{vendor}\" %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | less # (this example) search term: Thu 05 Mar

last.fm rss parser
you can just use one awk script to parse the rss feed. No need to pipe so many awk's and sed's. Its ugly and inefficient.


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