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Adding Prefix to File name

A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

Function that outputs dots every second until command completes
Very useful in shell scripts because you can run a task nicely in the background using job-control and output progress until it completes. Here's an example of how I use it in backup scripts to run gpg in the background to encrypt an archive file (which I create in this same way). $! is the process ID of the last run command, which is saved here as the variable PI, then sleeper is called with the process id of the gpg task (PI), and sleeper is also specified to output : instead of the default . every 3 seconds instead of the default 1. So a shorter version would be sleeper $!; The wait is also used here, though it may not be needed on your system. $ echo ">>> ENCRYPTING SQL BACKUP" $ gpg --output archive.tgz.asc --encrypt archive.tgz 1>/dev/null & $ PI=$!; sleeper $PI ":" 3; wait $PI && rm archive.tgz &>/dev/null Previously to get around the $! not always being available, I would instead check for the existance of the process ID by checking if the directory /proc/$PID existed, but not everyone uses proc anymore. That version is currently the one at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html but I plan on upgrading to this new version soon.

list files recursively by size

To have only unique lines in a file

Change your swappiness Ratio under linux
This command allow you to set the swappiness var at 50 (default is 60). The value interval must be set between 0 and 100. If swappiness is high=Swap usage is high, if swappiness is low=Ram usage is high.

Display current bandwidth statistics
ifstat, part of ifstat package, is a tool for displaying bandwidth and other statistics. The -n option avoid to display header periodically, the -t option put a timestamp at the beginning of the line. Works for me on Debian and CentOS

Reverse ssh
Both hosts must be running ssh and also the outside host must have a port forwarded to port 22.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Pipe STDOUT to vim
The hyphen tells vim to open from STDOUT - saves having to create temporary files.


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