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

multiline data block parse and CSV data extraction with perl
extract data in multiline blocks of data with perl pattern matching loop

Random colours at random locations

Get information about libraries currently installed on a system.
This command is very helpful when we need to duplicate a test scenario and first we want to find out the installed libraries together with the version and release numbers and architecture. (look example) Command can be tuned by choosing just the names of libraries we are interested in. For example glibc and gcc.

Compression formats Benchmark
See: http://imgur.com/JgjK2.png for example. Do some serious benchmarking from the commandline. This will write to a file with the time it took to compress n bytes to the file (increasing by 1). Run: $ gnuplot -persist

Give all those pictures the same name format, trailing zeros please for the right order, offset to merge different collections of pictures
When you have different digital cameras, different people, friends and you want to merge all those pictures together, then you get files with same names or files with 3 and 4 digit numbers etc. The result is a mess if you copy it together into one directory. But if you can add an offset to the picture number and set the number of leading zeros in the file name's number then you can manage. OFFS != 0 and LZ the same as the files currently have is not supported. Or left as an exercise, hoho ;) I love NF="${NF/#+(0)/}",it looks like a magic bash spell.

autossh + ssh + screen = super rad perma-sessions
Only useful for really flakey connections (but im stuck with one for now). Though if youre in this situation ive found this to be a good way to run autossh and it does a pretty good job of detecting when the session is down and restarting. Combined with the -t and screen commands this pops you back into your working session lickety split w/ as few headaches as possible. And if autossh is a bit slow at detecting the downed ssh connection, just run this in another tab/terminal window to notify autossh that it should drop it and start over. Basically for when polling is too slow. kill -SIGUSR1 `pgrep autossh`

Download song from youtube for import into itunes (m4a format)
Last argument is the youtube link. Requires ffmpeg

List only directories, one per line
omit the 1 (one) if you don't need one-per-line

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa


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