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Check how far along (in %) your program is in a file
Imagine you've started a long-running process that involves piping data, but you forgot to add the progress-bar option to a command. e.g. $ xz -dc bigdata.xz | complicated-processing-program > summary . This command uses lsof to see how much data xz has read from the file. $ lsof -o0 -o -Fo FILENAME Display offsets (-o), in decimal (-o0), in parseable form (-Fo) This will output something like: . p12607 f3 o0t45187072 . Process id (p), File Descriptor (f), Offset (o) . We stat the file to get its size $ stat -c %s FILENAME . Then we plug the values into awk. Split the line at the letter t: -Ft Define a variable for the file's size: -s=$(stat...) Only work on the offset line: /^o/ . Note this command was tested using the Linux version of lsof. Because it uses lsof's batch option (-F) it may be portable. . Thanks to @unhammer for the brilliant idea.

Play all the music in a folder, on shuffle
Page up for next song

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Remove git branches that do not have a remote tracking branch anymore

no # comments, blank lines, white space. # can start in any column
The shortest and most complete comment/blank line remover... Any line where the first non-whitespace character is # (ie, indented # comments), and all null and blank lines are removed. Use the alias as a filter: $ noc /etc/hosts or $ grep server /etc/hosts | noc Change to nawk depending awk versions.

most used commands in history (comprehensive)
Most of the "most used commands" approaches does not consider pipes and other complexities. This approach considers pipes, process substitution by backticks or $() and multiple commands separated by ; Perl regular expression breaks up each line using | or < ( or ; or ` or $( and picks the first word (excluding "do" in case of for loops) note: if you are using lots of perl one-liners, the perl commands will be counted as well in this approach, since semicolon is used as a separator

Best option set for 7zip compression of database dumps or generic text files
These re the best option combination that works fine for compressing my database dumps. It's possible that there are another option or value that might improve the compression ratio, by these are the ones that worked, the syntax for 7zr it's a little messy...

Print permanent subtitles on a video
It prints myvideo.srt subtitle files in myvideo.avi, saving it in myvideo_subtitled.avi

Use Kernighan & Ritchie coding style in C program

Kill any process with one command using program name
See also: killall


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