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Find out current working directory of a process

Convert an image sequence into a video

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.

Generate MD5 of string and output only the hash checksum in a readable format
Generates the md5 hash, without the trailing " -" and with the output "broken" into pairs of hexs.

Empty Bind9 cache
Occasionally, to force zone updating, cache flush is necessary. The use of this command is better than restart the Bind9 process.

count the number of specific characters in a file or text stream
In this example, the command will recursively find files (-type f) under /some/path, where the path ends in .mp3, case insensitive (-iregex). It will then output a single line of output (-print0), with results terminated by a the null character (octal 000). Suitable for piping to xargs -0. This type of output avoids issues with garbage in paths, like unclosed quotes. The tr command then strips away everything but the null chars, finally piping to wc -c, to get a character count. I have found this very useful, to verify one is getting the right number of before you actually process the results through xargs or similar. Yes, one can issue the find without the -print0 and use wc -l, however if you want to be 1000% sure your find command is giving you the expected number of results, this is a simple way to check. The approach can be made in to a function and then included in .bashrc or similar. e.g. $ count_chars() { tr -d -c "$1" | wc -c; } In this form it provides a versatile character counter of text streams :)

live ssh network throughput test
connects to host via ssh and displays the live transfer speed, directing all transferred data to /dev/null needs pv installed Debian: 'apt-get install pv' Fedora: 'yum install pv' (may need the 'extras' repository enabled)

Wget Command to Download Full Recursive Version of Web Page
The example will create a directory called "www.foo.com" that will contain an index.html page and any necessary images/css required for the page to load. Caveats: @imports of css files will not be converted.

password generator
make password randomly, default 8 chars, using bash3.X only, no external program.

Get full directory path of a script regardless of where it is run from
Also resolves symlinks, showing the full path of the link target


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