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sort ugly text
Often, when sorting you want the sort to ignore extraneous characters. The b, d, and f tell sort to ignore leading blanks, use 'dictionary order' (ignore punctuation), and ignore (fold) case. Add a "u" if you only want one copy of duplicate lines. This is a great command to use within vim to sort lines of text, using !}sort -bdf

Check if filesystem hangs
When a fs hangs and you've just one console, even # ls could be a dangerous command. Simply put a trailing "&" and play safe

Generate Random Text based on Length
Random text of length "$1" without the useless cat command.

list files recursively by size

Dump sqlite database to plain text format
If you want edit your sqlite database in any uft8 supported editor, you can dump whole sqlite database to plain text.

save date and time for each command in history
Date-time format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

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" }

Continually monitor things
You can use this one-liner for a quick and dirty (more customizable) alternative to the watch command. The keys to making this work: everything exists in an infinite loop; the loop starts with a clear; the loop ends with a sleep. Enter whatever you'd like to keep an eye on in the middle.

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

The fastest remote directory rsync over ssh archival I can muster (40MB/s over 1gb NICs)
This creates an archive that does the following: rsync:: (Everyone seems to like -z, but it is much slower for me) -a: archive mode - rescursive, preserves owner, preserves permissions, preserves modification times, preserves group, copies symlinks as symlinks, preserves device files. -H: preserves hard-links -A: preserves ACLs -X: preserves extended attributes -x: don't cross file-system boundaries -v: increase verbosity --numeric-ds: don't map uid/gid values by user/group name --delete: delete extraneous files from dest dirs (differential clean-up during sync) --progress: show progress during transfer ssh:: -T: turn off pseudo-tty to decrease cpu load on destination. -c arcfour: use the weakest but fastest SSH encryption. Must specify "Ciphers arcfour" in sshd_config on destination. -o Compression=no: Turn off SSH compression. -x: turn off X forwarding if it is on by default. Flip: rsync -aHAXxv --numeric-ids --delete --progress -e "ssh -T -c arcfour -o Compression=no -x" [source_dir] [dest_host:/dest_dir]


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