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For finding out if something is listening on a port and if so what the daemon is.

Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

dd with progress bar and statistics
Uses the pv utility to show progress of data transfer and an ETA until completion. You can install pv via Homebrew on macOS

Replace multiple file extensions with a single extension
The above is just a prove of concept based around the nested bash substitution. This could be useful in situations where you're in a directory with many filetypes but you only want to convert a few. $ for f in *.bmp *.jpg *.tga; do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done or you can use ls | egrep to get more specific... but be warned, files with spaces will cause a ruckus with expansion but the bash for loop uses a space delimited list. $ for f in $(ls | egrep "bmp$|jpg$|tga$"); do convert $f ${f%.*}.png; done I'm guessing some people will still prefer doing it the sed way but I thought the concept of this one was pretty neat. It will help me remember bash substitutions a little better :-P

Url Encode
Converts reserved characters in a URI to their percent encoded counterparts. Alternate python version: $ echo "$url" | python -c 'import sys,urllib;print urllib.quote(sys.stdin.read().strip())'

scheduled jobs

Get a docker container's run command line
A good way to build a new container when you don't remember how you did it the first time

check open ports without netstat or lsof

List all Windows services on the command line
On Windows 2000 or later, this command will give a listing of all the registered Windows services. You can then know what the name of a command is in order to start and stop it. e.g. $ sc start Apache2.2 or $ net start Apache2.2 Please note that sc will allow the SERVICE_NAME only, while net will allow both SERVICE_NAME and DISPLAY_NAME. Note that the space between the = and the next word are important. Not very unixy, that. http://www.ss64.com/nt/sc.html http://www.ss64.com/nt/net_service.html http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490995.aspx

Convert all files for iPhone with HandbrakeCLI


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