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creating you're logging function for your script
You could also pipe to logger.

Use Cygwin to talk to the Windows clipboard
I spent a bunch of time yesterday looking for the xsel package in Cygwin- turns out you can use the /dev/clipboard device to do the same thing.

List directories recursively showing its sizes using only ls and grep
ls -lhR Lists everithing using -l "long listing format" wich includes the space used by the folder. Displays it in -h "human readable form" (i.e. 2.2G, 32K), and -R recurses subfolders. grep -e using a regex, show lines containing the word "total" or a ":" at the end of the line (those with the name of the folder) only.

IBM AIX: Extract a .tar.gz archive in one shot
This command is for UNIX OSes that have plain vanilla System V UNIX commands instead of their more functional GNU counterparts, such as IBM AIX.

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

du and sort to find the biggest directories in defined filesystem
I had the problem that our monitoring showed that the "/" filesystem is >90% full. This command helped me to find out fast which subdirs are the biggest. The system has many NFS-mounts therefore the -x.

Perl one liner for epoch time conversion
Converts Unix epoch time to localtime. Useful for any logs that only display epoch time.

Checks the syntax of all PHP files in and below the current working directory
Uses the PHP binary to check the syntax of all .php files in or below the current working directory. Really handy for doing that last minute check before you commit code to the repository.

Random numbers with Ruby
There's been a few times I've needed to create random numbers. Although I've done so in PERL, I've found Ruby is actually faster. This script generates 20 random "10" digit number NOT A RANDOM NUMBER. Replace 20 (1..20) with the amount of random numbers you need generated

Query wikipedia over DNS


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