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List manually installed packages (excluding Essentials)

recursively walk down no more than three levels and grab any file with an extension of mp3, mpg, mpeg, or avi

Exclude inserting a table from a sql import
Starting with a large MySQL dump file (*.sql) remove any lines that have inserts for the specified table. Sometimes one or two tables are very large and uneeded, eg. log tables. To exclude multiple tables you can get fancy with sed, or just run the command again on subsequently generated files.

function to compute what percentage of X is Y? Where percent/100 = X/Y => percent=100*X/Y
This function make it easy to compute X/Y as a percentage. The name "wpoxiy" is an acronym of "what percentage of X is Y"

Remove multiple spaces
The command removes all the spaces whithin a file and leaves only one space.

remove all snapshots from all virtual machines in vmware esx
Old snapshots can cause problems. It's best to remove them when finished. I use this script to remove all snapshots. The "while read" command is necessary because my vm names contain spaces. The "time" command reports how long the process runs.

Test how well a web server handles concurrent connections and big load.
This command will execute 1000 requests to the http URL http://127.0.0.1:8000 handlink 100 concurent connections at a time. Then it will display statistics about the time that have been taken.

How to run a command on a list of remote servers read from a file
dsh - Distributed shell, or dancer?s shell ;-) you can put your servers into /etc/dsh/machines.list than you don't have to serperate them by commata or group them in different files and only run commands for this groups dsh -M -c -a -- "apt-get update"

Do a search-and-replace in a file after making a backup

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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