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Listing directory content of a directory with a lot of entries
Ever wanted to get the directory content with 'ls' or 'find' and had to wait minutes until something was printed? Perl to the rescue. The one-liner above(redirected to a file) took less than five seconds to run in a directory with more man 2 million files. One can adapt it to e.g. delete files that match a certain pattern.

Extract audio track from a video file using mencoder
Extracts an MP3 encoded audio stream from an input video file.

VMware Server print out the state of all registered Virtual Machines.
I use this command on my machines running VMware Server to print out the state of all registered Virtual machines.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Create/open/use encrypted directory
Create/open/use an encrypted directory encfs needs to be installed During creation easiest to use default values The encrypted files will be in ~/.crypt and you will work as usual in ~/crypt To close the encrypted directory run: fusermount -u ~/crypt When you switch off the computer the encrypted directory will be automatically closed This example uses /home/user/crypt as encrypted directory I use ubuntu linux 8.04 and I am also the creator of www.minihowto.org

List Threads by Pid along with Thread Start Time
This command will list all threads started by a particular pid along with the start time of each thread. This is very valuable when diagnosing thread leaks.

Replicate a directory structure dropping the files

Set CDPATH to ease navigation
CDPATH tells the cd command to look in this colon-separated list of directories for your destination. My preferred order are 1) the current directory, specified by the empty string between the = and the first colon, 2) the parent directory (so that I can cd lib instead of cd ../lib), 3) my home directory, and 4) my ~/projects directory.

Send an email from the terminal when job finishes
Might as well include the status code it exited with so you know right away if it failed or not.

currently mounted filesystems in nice layout
Particularly useful if you're mounting different drives, using the following command will allow you to see all the filesystems currently mounted on your computer and their respective specs with the added benefit of nice formatting.


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