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Show me just the ip address
Sometimes it's useful to output just the ip address. Or some other information, changing the "ipv4.addresses" in command. The power of awk! Show all possible "greps" with $ nmcli connection show [yourInterfaceNameHere]

Find where a kind of file is stored
In this case searches for where .desktop files are stored. The resulted is a sorted list of the top directories containing such files.

Extract busiest times from apache access log
Analyze an Apache access log for the time period with most activity and display the hit count, requesting IP and the timestamp. May help detect a brute force dos attack.

Figure out what shell you're running

Clean swap area after using a memory hogging application
When you run a memory intensive application (VirtualBox, large java application, etc) swap area is used as soon as memory becomes insufficient. After you close the program, the data in swap is not put back on memory and that decreases the responsiveness. Swapoff disables the swap area and forces system to put swap data be placed in memory. Since running without a swap area might be detrimental, swapon should be used to activate swap again. Both swapoff and swapon require root privileges.

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

Cd Deluxe - improved cd command for *nix and windows
Hello, Take a look at this free cd replacement - "cd deluxe" a.k.a. "cdd". It is a free open source (GPLv3) application that I have created. As a long time command line enthusiast I have always been frustrated with the limited capabilities of the humble "cd" command. Especially since that is the most commonly used command line utility! See http://www.plan10.com/cdd for the full details and download information. Thanks, -Mike

list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB
list the top 15 folders by decreasing size in MB

Outputs each arg on its own line
This can be useful for transforming command-line args into input for xargs (one per line). This can also be done with ls if the args are filenames, but that's getting awfully close to Useless Use of Cat territory (http://partmaps.org/era/unix/award.html).

Automatically skip bad songs in your MPD playlist.
Case insensitive. Also you can pull in the songs from a blacklist, one per line - while :; do (mpc current | grep -i -f blacklist.txt && mpc next); sleep 5; done


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