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Alternative size (human readable) of files and directories (biggest last)
using mb it's still readable;) a symbol variation $ du -ms {,.[^.]}* | sort -nk1

Using numsum to sum a column of numbers.
numsum is part of of the num-utils package, which is available in some Linux distros and can also be downloaded at http://suso.suso.org/xulu/Num-utils. It contains about 10 different programs for dealing with numbers from the command line. Obviously you can do a lot of things that the num-utils programs do in awk, sed, bash, perl scripts, but num-utils are there so that you don't have to remember the syntax for more complex operations and can just think: compute the sum, average, boundary numbers, etc.

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
As of this writing, this requires a fairly recent version of util-linux, but is much simpler than the previous alternatives. Basically, lsblk gives a nice, human readable interface to all the blkid stuff. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend this if you're going to be parsing the output.) This command takes all the fun out of the previous nifty pipelines, but I felt I ought to at least mention it as an alternative since it is the most practical.

Search for a process by name
ps and grep is a dangerous combination -- grep tries to match everything on each line (thus the all too common: grep -v grep hack). ps -C doesn't use grep, it uses the process table for an exact match. Thus, you'll get an accurate list with: ps -fC sh rather finding every process with sh somewhere on the line.

JSON processing with Python
Validates and pretty-prints the content fetched from the URL.

Start screen with name and run command
Runs an instance of screen with name of "name_me" and command of "echo "hi"" To reconnect to screen instance later use: screen -r name_me

send a circular

to see about php configure
see about php install configure

use jq to validate and pretty-print json output
the `jq` tool can also be used do validate json files and pretty print output `cat file.json | jq` available on several platforms, including newer debian-based systems via `#sudo apt install jq`, mac via `brew install jq`, and from source https://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/

ptree equivalent in HP-UX
By setting the UNIX95 variable in HP-UX the XPG4 mode is activated, you get new options for ps and other commands, for me the best way to use this is to create an alias named ptree in root profile: alias ptree='UNIX95=1 ps -eH'


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