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Show exit status of all portions of a piped command eg. ls |this_doesn't_exist |wc

a function to find the fastest free DNS server
Evoke from the command like as: $ timeDNS commandlinefu.com . This isn't too terribly practical, but it is a good code example of using subshells to run the queries in parallel and the use of an "anonymous function" (a/k/a "inline group") to group i/o. . I'm assuming you have already defined your local DNS cache as ${local_DNS}, (here, it's 192.168.0.1). . You do need to install `moreutils` to get `sponge`. . If you're willing to wait, a slower version w/o sponge, (and w/o sorting), is this: . DNS () { for x in "192.168.0.1" "208.67.222.222" "208.67.220.220" "198.153.192.1" "198.153.194.1" "156.154.70.1" "156.154.71.1" "8.8.8.8" "8.8.4.4"; do (echo -n "$x "; dig @"$x" "$*"|grep Query) ; done ; }

Detach a process from the current shell
Continue to execute the command in background even though quitting the shell.

Ripping VCD in Linux
Ripping VCD in Linux

Easy to extend one-liner for cron scripts that automate filesystem checking
This one-liner is for cron jobs that need to provide some basic information about a filesystem and the time it takes to complete the operation. You can swap out the di command for df or du if that's your thing. The |& redirections the stderr and stdout to the mail command. How to configure the variables. TOFSCK=/path/to/mount FSCKDEV=/dev/path/device or FSCKDEV=`grep $TOFSCK /proc/mounts | cut -f1 -d" "` MAILSUB="weekly file system check $TOFSCK "

Quickly add a new user to all groups the default user is in
This is a standard procedure for me, whenever I set up a new Raspberry Pi system. Because the default user is "pi", I quickly replace it with my own (e.g. "kostis"), but I have to substitute that user to all of pi's groups first, before deleting the default account. xargs helps a lot with that in a single line, while avoiding boring "for" loops. For everything trickier, there's always "parallel" :)

Find Duplicate Files (based on size first, then MD5 hash)
for OS X

Watch the progress of 'dd'
The previously-posted one-liner didn't work for me for whatever reason, so I ended up doing this instead.

Join lines
It's works only when you replace '\n' to ONE character.

Resize A Mounted EXT3 File System
Live extension of an ext3 file system on logical volume $v by 200GB without the need to unmount/remount. Requires that you have 1) a version of resize2fs that contains code merged from ext2online, and 2) kernel support for online resizing. (e.g. RHEL 5)


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