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Copy structure
Clone directory structure without the files

find out which directories in /home have the most files currently open

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

Calculate pi to an arbitrary number of decimal places
Change the scale to adjust number of decimal places prefix the command with "time" to benchmark the computer (compare how long it takes to calculate 10000 digits of pi on various computers).

recurisvely md5 all files in a tree
Found this little gem here: http://info.michael-simons.eu/2008/10/25/recursively-md5sum-all-files-in-a-directory-tree/

Figure out what shell you're running

dd with progress bar and statistics to gzipped image
This is a useful command to backup an sd card with relative total size for piping to pv with a progressbar

Keep a copy of the raw Youtube FLV,MP4,etc stored in /tmp/
Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

Play Mediafile in multipart RAR archive on the fly with buffer to seek back and forth
Fire this up in the directory of the RAR achived files to watch any archived movie tv-show or other media without having to unpack it. I also added a cache/buffer to be able to seek back and forth.

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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