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tail: watch a filelog
-f file(s) to be monitorized -n number of last line to be printed on the screen in this example, the content of two files are displayed

run command on a group of nodes in parallel

random xkcd comic
i sorta stole this from http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=878#MTC_form but it didn't work, so here it is, fixed. --- updated to work with jpegs, and to use a fancy positive look behind assertion.

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

scp file from hostb to hostc while logged into hosta
While at the command line of of hosta, scp a file from remote hostb to remote hostc. This saves the step of logging into hostb and then issuing the scp command to hostc.

Use Perl like grep
If you've ever tried "grep -P" you know how terrible it is. Even the man page describes it as "highly experimental". This function will let you 'grep' pipes and files using Perl syntax for regular expressions. The first argument is the pattern, e.g. '/foo/'. The second argument is a filename (optional).

Clear filesystem memory cache

get a rough estimate about how much disk space is used by all the currently installed debian packages
The vaule is expressed in megabytes

Greets the user appropriately

awk using multiple field separators
You can use multiple field separators by separating them with | (=or). This may be helpful when you want to split a string by two separators for example. #echo "one=two three" | awk -F "=| " {'print $1, $3'} one three


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