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Getting ESP and EIP addresses from running processes
'ps' let you specify the format that you want to see on the output.

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa

get rid of lines with non ascii characters
found here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9035939

A command's package details
In Debian based distros, this command will list 'binutils' package details which contains 'nm' command. You can replace 'nm' to any other command.

Create and play an instant keyword based playlist
It works best as part of a function, such as the following: MUSICROOT=~/Music function fplay { if [ $1 = '-v' ]; then shift 1 find -E $MUSICROOT -type f -iname "*$**" -iregex '.*\.(3g[2|p]|aac|ac3|adts|aif[c|f]?|amr|and|au|caf|m4[a|r|v]|mp[1-4|a]|mpeg[0,9]?|sd2|wav)' -print -exec afplay "{}" \; & else find -E $MUSICROOT -type f -iname "*$**" -iregex '.*\.(3g[2|p]|aac|ac3|adts|aif[c|f]?|amr|and|au|caf|m4[a|r|v]|mp[1-4|a]|mpeg[0,9]?|sd2|wav)' -exec afplay "{}" \; & fi }

Select rectangular screen area
Hold 'Ctrl' + 'Alt' key while selecting rectangular text area of the screen with left mouse button. Should work in any terminal screen (xterm, konsole, ...) under X, if not then try with 'Ctrl' + 'Shift' + 'Alt' or two-combination of these.

Find all videos under current directory
Uses mime-type of files rather than relying on file extensions to find files of a certain type. This can obviously be extended to finding files of any other type as well.. like plain text files, audio, etc.. In reference to displaying the total hours of video (which was earlier posted in command line fu, but relied on the user having to supply all possible video file formats) we can now do better: $ find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -iNf - | grep video | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -d'\n' /usr/share/doc/mplayer/examples/midentify | grep ID_LENGTH | awk -F "=" '{sum += $2} END {print sum/60/60; print "hours"}'

Show me just the ip address
Sometimes it's useful to output just the ip address. Or some other information, changing the "ipv4.addresses" in command. The power of awk! Show all possible "greps" with $ nmcli connection show [yourInterfaceNameHere]

Multi line grep using sed and specifying open/close tags
Working with log files that contains variable length messages wrapped between open and close tags it may be useful to filter the messages upon a keyword. This works fine with GNU sed version 4.2 or higher, so pay attention to some unix distros (solaris, hp-ux, etc.). Linux should be ok.

Functions to display, save and restore $IFS
You can display, save and restore the value of $IFS using conventional Bash commands, but these functions, which you can add to your ~/.bashrc file make it really easy. To display $IFS use the function ifs shown above. In the sample output, you can see that it displays the characters and their hexadecimal equivalent. This function saves it in a variable called $saveIFS: $ sifs () { saveIFS=$IFS; } Use this function to restore it $ rifs () { IFS=$saveIFS; } Add this line in your ~/.bashrc file to save a readonly copy of $IFS: $ declare -r roIFS=$IFS Use this function to restore that one to $IFS $ rrifs () { IFS=$roIFS; }


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