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Clone IDE Hard Disk
This command clone the first partition of the primary master IDE drive to the second partition of the primary slave IDE drive (!!! back up all data before trying anything like this !!!)

Get size of terminal
See the cols and lines and make sure the console it correctly configured for the screen size.

Show linux kernel modules dependencies
Use modprobe to list all the dependencies of a certain kernel module. Handy when debugging system issues.

Daily watch "question pour un champion" (French TV show)
kaffeine could be replaced by any player able to read mms stream

Efficiently extract lines between markers
GNU Sed can 'address' between two regex, but it continues parsing through to the end of the file. This slight alteration causes it to terminate reading the input file once the STOP match is made. In my example I have included an extra '/START/d' as my 'start' marker line contains the 'stop' string (I'm extracting data between 'resets' and using the time stamp as the 'start'). My previous coding using grep is slightly faster near the end of the file, but overall (extracting all the reset cycles in turn) the new SED method is quicker and a lot neater.

Banner Grabber

Detect if we are running on a VMware virtual machine
If you run this command on a VMWare Virtual Machine, it will return the string "VMware Virtual Platform". If you run it on a physical machine, it will return nothing. Useful for having a script determine if it's running on a VM or not. Of course, you must have dmidecode installed for this to work. Try it this way in a script: ISVM=$(dmidecode | awk '/VMware Virtual Platform/ {print $3,$4,$5}') Then test if $ISVM has text in it, or is blank.

Random quote from Borat -- no html parsing
Turns out smacie.com has a text file containing every single one of the borat quotes, each one on a newline. This makes it very convenient, as this can be done without any sed-parsing, and uses less bandwitdth! Note that borate quotes are quite offensive, much more so than "fortunes-off"!

Add a line to a file using sudo
This is the solution to the common mistake made by sudo newbies, since $ sudo echo "foo bar" >> /path/to/some/file does NOT add to the file as root. Alternatively, $ sudo echo "foo bar" > /path/to/some/file should be replaced by $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee /path/to/some/file And you can add a >/dev/null in the end if you're not interested in the tee stdout : $ echo "foo bar" | sudo tee -a /path/to/some/file >/dev/null

postgresql SQL to show count of ALL tables (relations) including relation-size
Postgresql specific SQL - to show count of ALL tables including relation-size (pg_relation_size = used space on filesystem) - might need a VACUUM ANALYZE before showing all counts correctly !


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