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Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

find string into one pdf file

Create .pdf from .doc
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Apply an xdelta patch to a file
xdelta is a command line program for delta encoding, which generates the difference between two files. This is similar to diff and patch, but it is targeted for binary files and does not generate human readable output. http://xdelta.org/

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

check open ports without netstat or lsof

list processes with established tcp connections (without netstat)
Uses lsof to list open network connections (file descriptors), grepping for only those in an established state


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