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Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Copy all files, including hidden files, recursively without traversing backward
You could do the following, however, brace expansion with {} is not defined in POSIX, and therefore not guaranteed to work in all shells. But, if it does, it's more convenient (although it's certainly not less typing): $ cp -r {*,.??*} /dest Sometimes there are times when I need to cp(1), mv(1) or rm(1) files recursively, but don't want to traverse the previous directory by following ../../../../ etc out of the current directory. This command prevents that. The secret sauce is ".??*". The file globbing ensures that it must start with a dot, and be followed by at least two characters. So, three characters must exist in the filename, which eliminates "." and "..".

Paste OS X clipboard contents to a file on a remote machine
Redirects the contents of your clipboard through a pipe, to a remote machine via SSH.

Display a wave pattern
Purely frivolous - print a sine/cosine curve to the console - the width varies as it progresses. Ctrl-C to halt.

Generates a TV noise alike output in the terminal
Generates a TV noise alike output in the terminal. Can be combined with https://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/9728/make-some-powerful-pink-noise

a find and replace within text-based files
using find's exec option instead of a for loop and using sed's -i option for inplace replacement. no need to do the file swap.

Found how how much memory in kB $PID is occupying in Linux
The "proportional set size" is probably the closest representation of how much active memory a process is using in the Linux virtual memory stack. This number should also closely represent the %mem found in ps(1), htop(1), and other utilities.

Rip DVD to YouTube ready MPEG-4 AVI file using mencoder
Rip DVD to YouTube ready AVI file, using MPEG-4 video codec and MP3 audio codec. Resizes to 320x240 and deinterlaces as needed.

gawk gets fixed width field

determine if tcp port is open
Requires netcat.


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