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Short one line while loop that outputs parameterized content from one file to another
The above is an example of grabbing only the first column. You can define the start and end points specifically by chacater position using the following command: $ while read l; do echo ${l:10:40}; done < three-column-list.txt > column-c10-c40.txt Of course, it doesn't have to be a column, or extraction, it can be replacement $ while read l; do echo ${l/foo/bar}; done < list-with-foo.txt > list-with-bar.txt Read more about parameter expansion here: http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/pe Think of this as an alternative to awk or sed for file operations

One liner to kill a process when knowing only the port where the process is running
-k (kill option ) . To kill all processes accessing this port

for all who don't have the watch command

List your largest installed packages.
Calculates the size on disk for each package installed on the filesystem (or removed but not purged). This is missing the $ | sort -rn which would put the biggest packges on top. That was purposely left out as the command is slightly on the slow side Also you may need to run this as root as some files can only be checked by du if you can read them ;)

Get all IPs via ifconfig
and, a lot uglier, with sed: $ ifconfig | sed -n '/inet addr:/s/[^:]\+:\(\S\+\).*/\1/p' Edit: Wanted to be shorter than the perl version. Still think that the perl version is the best..

Delay execution until load average falls under 1.5
If shell escaping of the command is problematic, you can write the command to a file first: $ batch

Search for a string inside all files in the current directory
This is how I typically grep. -R recurse into subdirectories, -n show line numbers of matches, -i ignore case, -s suppress "doesn't exist" and "can't read" messages, -I ignore binary files (technically, process them as having no matches, important for showing inverted results with -v) I have grep aliased to "grep --color=auto" as well, but that's a matter of formatting not function.

Create QR codes from a URL.
QR codes are those funny square 2d bar codes that everyone seems to be pointing their smart phones at. Try the following... $ qrurl http://xkcd.com Then open qr.*.png in your favorite image viewer. Point your the bar code reader on your smart phone at the code, and you'll shortly be reading xkcd on your phone. URLs are not the only thing that can be encoded by QR codes... short texts (to around 2K) can be encoded this way, although this function doesn't do any URL encoding, so unless you want to do that by hand it won't be useful for that.

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
Change to your taste. Much quicker than having to add 'cd' every time. Add it to your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.


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