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kill process by name
Or even easier, if it's available: $ killall firefox I have no idea why you would want to rely on two unusual dependencies to do something that can be done a hundred ways from coreutils...

Find all videos under current directory
Uses mime-type of files rather than relying on file extensions to find files of a certain type. This can obviously be extended to finding files of any other type as well.. like plain text files, audio, etc.. In reference to displaying the total hours of video (which was earlier posted in command line fu, but relied on the user having to supply all possible video file formats) we can now do better: $ find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -iNf - | grep video | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -d'\n' /usr/share/doc/mplayer/examples/midentify | grep ID_LENGTH | awk -F "=" '{sum += $2} END {print sum/60/60; print "hours"}'

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

create a simple version of ls with extended output
create a short alias for 'ls' with multi-column (-C), file type syntax additions (slashes after directories, @ for symlinks, etc... (-F), long format (-l), including hidden directories (all ./, ../, .svn, etc) (-a), show file-system blocks actually in use (-s), human readable file sizes (-h)

Get your bash scripts to handle options (-h, --help etc) and spit out auto-formatted help or man page when asked!!
This will make your bash scripts better!! process-getopt is a wrapper around getopt(1) for bash that lets you define command line options (eg -h, --help) and descriptions through a single function call. These definitions are then used in runtime processing of command line options as well as in generating help and man pages. It also saves a little time in coding and in producing nicely formatted documentation. It is quite similar to GNU's argp in glibc for compiled languages and OptionParse for python. See: Linux Gazette article 162: http://tldp.org/LDP/LGNET/162/hepple.html, http://sourceforge.net/projects/process-getopt, http://bhepple.freeshell.org/oddmuse/wiki.cgi/process-getopt

Convert encoding of given files from one encoding to another

random xkcd comic as xml

Remove all .svn folders
-depth argument will cause find to do a "depth first" tree search, this will eliminate the "No such file or directory" error messages

Colored diff ( via vim ) on 2 remotes files on your local computer.
You can use $ vim scp://root@example.com//file too in a simple case.

Show the command line for a PID, converting nulls to spaces and a newline


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