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Does a full update and cleaning in one line

test for ksh/bash
Dave Korn gave me this one. It works because ksh allows variable names ( w/o the $name syntax ) used by sh and bash. I wrote it to permit "single source" shell libraries; the current objective: every shell library may be sourced by either shell. see http://github.com/applemcg/backash

show each new entry in system messages as a popup
It willl popup a message for each new entry in /var/log/messages found on the notify-send howto page on ubuntuforums.org. Posted here only because it is one of the favourites of mine.

find and delete empty directories recursively
this will show the names of the deleted directories, and will delete directories that only no files, only empty directories.

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

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"

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

Join lines split with backslash at the end
Joins each line that end with backslash (common way to mark line continuation in many languages) with the following one while removing the backslash.

Multi-thread any command
For instance: $ find . -type f -name '*.wav' -print0 |xargs -0 -P 3 -n 1 flac -V8 will encode all .wav files into FLAC in parallel. Explanation of xargs flags: -P [max-procs]: Max number of invocations to run at once. Set to 0 to run all at once [potentially dangerous re: excessive RAM usage]. -n [max-args]: Max number of arguments from the list to send to each invocation. -0: Stdin is a null-terminated list. I use xargs to build parallel-processing frameworks into my scripts like the one here: http://pastebin.com/1GvcifYa


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