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Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

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 :)

Realtime lines per second in a log file
Displays the realtime line output rate of a logfile. -l tels pv to count lines -i to refresh every 10 seconds -l option is not in old versions of pv. If the remote system has an old pv version: ssh tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | pv -l -i10 -r >/dev/null

Download Entire YouTube Channel - all of a user's videos
create the function then run 'yt-chanrip username' to download that user's entire channel. uses youtube-dl and the GData API. similar to http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3154/download-youtube-playlist

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

intercept stdout/stderr of another process
similar to the previous command, but with more friendly output (tested on linux)

Socksify any program to avoid restrictive firwalls
Require: - tsocks (deb pkg) - A working SOCKS proxy. It's easy with ssh: $ ssh -N -D localhost:1080 your.home.pc -p 443 - tsocks configuration in your /etc/tsocks.conf (for the previous): server = 127.0.0.1 server_port = 1080

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word passphrase (fast)
Some snippets posted are slow on big dictionaries, this one is fast.

Monitor Linux/MD RAID Rebuild

Password generator
https://xkcd.com/936/ introduced us to what actually is a good password. Here's such an implementation. Credit: quinq on #suckless


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