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Set access and modification timestamps of a file using another one as reference
atime and mtime timestamps of $FILE2 is changed according to the ones of $FILE1. If $FILE2 doesn't exist is created.

Redirect bash built-in output to stdout
I've had a horrible time trying to pipe the output of some shell built-ins like 'time' to other programs. The built-in doesn't output to stdout or stderr most of the time but using the above will let you pipe the output to something else.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Convert all .flac from a folder subtree in 192Kb mp3
find . -type f -iname '*.flac' # searches from the current folder recursively for .flac audio files | # the output (a .flac audio files with relative path from ./ ) is piped to while read FILE; do FILENAME="${FILE%.*}"; flac -cd "$FILE" | lame -b 192 - "${FILENAME}.mp3"; done # for each line on the list: # FILE gets the file with .flac extension and relative path # FILENAME gets FILE without the .flac extension # run flac for that FILE with output piped to lame conversion to mp3 using 192Kb bitrate

Find broken symlinks

list files recursively by size

Recompress all text files in a subdirectory with lzma
This will deal nicely with filenames containing newlines and will run one lzma process per CPU core. It requires GNU Parallel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

Output system statistics every 5 seconds with timestamp
See man vmstat for information about the statistics. This does the same thing without the timestamp: $vmstat 5

Check the package is installed or not. There will show the package name which is installed.
The ^python$ is a package name patten. You can change whatever you want.


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