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Find files with the same names in several directories.
cat file1 file2 file3|sort|uniq -d finds the same lines in several files, especially in files with lists of files.

Find last reboot time
Specific to OSX.

Save current layout of top
'top' has fancy layout modes where you can have several windows with different things displayed. You can configure a layout and then save it with 'W'. It will then be restored every time you run top. E.g. to have two colored windows, one sorted by CPU usage, the other by memory usage, run top $ top then press the keys $ and then as you don?t want to repeat this the next time: $

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" }

Find files and calculate size of result in shell
Find files and calculate size with stat of result in shell

Create/open/use encrypted directory
Create/open/use an encrypted directory encfs needs to be installed During creation easiest to use default values The encrypted files will be in ~/.crypt and you will work as usual in ~/crypt To close the encrypted directory run: fusermount -u ~/crypt When you switch off the computer the encrypted directory will be automatically closed This example uses /home/user/crypt as encrypted directory I use ubuntu linux 8.04 and I am also the creator of www.minihowto.org

Find ASCII files and extract IP addresses

Retrofit a shebang to an existing script
Function to add a shebang to an existing script, handy if you forgot to add it in the first place.

Edit a PDF's metadata using exiftool
Edit the pdf file foo.pdf's metadata. -overwrite_original overwrites the original file (w/o it exiftool creates a new file)

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"


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