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Check difference between two file directories recursively

Check ps output to see if file is running, if not start it
This comes in handy if you have daemons/programs that have potential issues and stop/disappear, etc., can be run in cron to ensure that a program remains up no matter what. Be advised though, if a program did core out, you'd likely want to know why (gdb) so use with caution on production machines.

Display all shell functions set in the current shell environment
Uses the shell builtin `declare` with the '-f' flag to output only functions to grep out only the function names. You can use it as an alias or function like so: alias shfunctions="builtin declare -f | command grep --color=never -E '^[a-zA-Z_]+\ \(\)'" shfunctions () { builtin declare -f | command grep --color=never -E '^[a-zA-Z_]+\ \(\)'; }

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)
$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}' 205413 real 0m0.497s user 0m0.220s sys 0m0.268s $ time { ls |wc -l; } 205413 real 0m3.776s user 0m3.340s sys 0m0.424s ********* ** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster: $ find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; } 205414 real 0m0.456s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.328s ** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version $ perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' 205414 real 0m0.415s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.232s

Realtime lines per second in a log file, with history
This is similar to standard `pv`, but it retains the rate history instead of only showing the current rate. This is useful for spotting changes. To do this, -f is used to force pv to output, and stderr is redirected to stdout so that `tr` can swap the carriage returns for new lines. (doesn't work correctly is in zsh for some reason. Tail's output isn't redirected to /dev/null like it is in bash. anyone know why? ???????)

Minimize active window
Bind it to some shortcut key, using something like xbindkeys-config (if you do not have xbindkeys: apt-get install xbindkeys xbindkeys-config)

how to find the active X (X11/xorg) username and DISPLAY variable
Requires consolekit (works in e.g. Ubuntu). Here x11-display is DISPLAY

Geolocate a given IP address

Remove Backup Files
Remove all text backup files.


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