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Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file
Say you're started "xzcat bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program >summary" an hour ago, and you of course forgot to enable progress output (you could've just put "awk 'NR%1000==0{print NR>"/dev/stderr"}{print}'" in the pipeline but it's too late for that now). But you really want some idea of how far along your program is. Then you can run the above command to see how many % along xzcat is in reading the file. Note that this is for the GNU/Linux version of lsof; the one found on e.g. Darwin has slightly different output so the awk part may need some tweaks.

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
"killall -USR1 dd" does not work in OS X for me. However, sending INFO instead of USR1 works.

Display condensed log in a tree-like format.
Display condensed log in a tree-like format.

Recursively remove .svn directories

Download Video & extract only a specific Time of it

unbuffered tcpdump
Sometimes the question comes up: How to get unbuffered tcpdump output into the next program in the pipe? i.e. if your OS forces you to wait for the buffer to fill before the next program sees any of the output If you use -Uw- then you can't use -A (or -X or -XX) at the same time. When the question comes up, I've never seen anyone suggest this simple solution: chaining 2 tcpdump instances.

Run a script in parrallel over ssh
Runs a local script over ssh assuming ssh keys are in place. -P argument prints results to stdout. # Uses - https://code.google.com/p/parallel-ssh/

continuously print string as if being entered from the keyboard
Cycles continuously through a string printing each character with a random delay less than 1 second. First parameter is min, 2nd is max. Example: 1 3 means sleep random .1 to .3. Experiment with different values. The 3rd parameter is the string. The sleep will help with battery life/power consumption. $ cycle 1 3 $(openssl rand 100 | xxd -p) Fans of "The Shining" might get a kick out of this: $ cycle 1 4 ' All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.'

quickest (i blv) way to get the current program name minus the path (BASH)
Useful in shell scripts when you're trying to get the shell script name without the full path - and easier than awking or cutting. Bash pattern matching and variable manip is fun.


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