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Display command lines visible on commandlinefu.com homepage
Uses the fabulous Hpricot library to parse HTML from Ruby. Extracts all elements of "command' class and displays unescaped text from inside these elements. The following command can help install dependencies (apart from Ruby itself) $ gem sources -a http://gems.github.com && sudo gem install why-hpricot

Insert a line at the top of a text file without sed or awk or bash loops
Just use '-' to use STDIN as an additional input to 'cat'

list files recursively by size

Remove comments from files
Use sed to remove comments from a file. In this example the comments begin with #. The command '/^#/d' remove line starting with #. The command 's/#.*$//' remove comments at end of lines.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Command to keep an SSH connection open
This runs the uptime command every 30 seconds to avoid an SSH connection dropping due to inactivity. Granted there are better ways of solving this problem but this is sometimes the right tool for the job.

find out how much space are occuipied by files smaller than 1024K (sic) - improved
The original didn't use -print0 which fails on weird file names eg with spaces. The original parsed the output of 'ls -l' which is always a bad idea.

Convert all MySQL tables and fields to UTF8
This loops through all tables and changes their collations to UTF8. You should backup beforehand though in case some data is lost in the process.

Search some text from all files inside a directory

bulk rename files with sed, one-liner
Far from my favorite, but works in sh and with an old sed that doesn't support '-E'


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