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The Hidden PS
While going through the source code for the well known ps command, I read about some interesting things.. Namely, that there are a bunch of different fields that ps can try and enumerate for you. These are fields I was not able to find in the man pages, documentation, only in the source. Here is a longer function that goes through each of the formats recognized by the ps on your machine, executes it, and then prompts you whether you would like to add it or not. Adding it simply adds it to an array that is then printed when you ctrl-c or at the end of the function run. This lets you save your favorite ones and then see the command to put in your .bash_profile like mine at : http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Note that I had to do the exec method below in order to pause with read. t () { local r l a P f=/tmp/ps c='command ps wwo pid:6,user:8,vsize:8,comm:20' IFS=' '; trap 'exec 66

Install a local RPM package from your desktop, then use the YUM repository to resolve its dependencies.
When downloading RPMs from the Internet, you don't have to 'rpm -i' or 'rpm -U' to install the package. Especially, if the package has dependencies. If you have YUM setup to access an RPM repository, this command will install the downloaded package, then any dependencies through YUM that it relies on. Very handy on RPM-based systems.

List .log files open by a pid
Uses lsof to display the full path of ".log" files opened by a specified PID.

ssh batch jobs: query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command
Need to query hundreds of hosts with an ssh command ? Of course you'll have setup keys on all your remote HOSTs. But in the case a key is not present this command will skip that node, proceeding on to the next. -t: Force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine. Also prevents unwanted stty messages being sent to console -q: Quiet mode. -o "BatchMode yes" If set to yes, passphrase/password querying will be disabled. This option is useful in scripts and other batch jobs where no user is present

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
The original proc file doesn't exist on my system.

To get you started!
Do it.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Show used disk space:

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully


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