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FAST Search and Replace for Strings in all Files in Directory
I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time.

Get the Volume labels all bitlocker volumes had before being encrypted
Get information of volume labels of bitlocker volumes, even if they are encrypted and locked (no access to filesystem, no password provided). Note that the volume labels can have spaces, but only if you name then before encryption. Renaming a bitlocker partition after being encrypted does not have the same effect as doing it before.

Override and update your locally modified files through cvs..

Get memory total from /proc/meminfo in Gigs

Get an authorization code from Google
This is a basis for other Google API commands.

List open files that have no links to them on the filesystem
I have come across a situation in the past where someone has unlinked a file by running an 'rm' command against it while it was still being written to by a running process. The problem manifested itself when a 'df' command showed a filesystem at 100%, but this did not match the total value of a 'du -sk *'. When this happens, the process continues to write to the file but you can no longer see the file on the filesystem. Stopping and starting the process will, more often than not, get rid of the unlinked file, however this is not always possible on a live server. When you are in this situation you can use the 'lsof' command above to get the PID of the process that owns the file (in the sample output this is 23521). Run the following command to see a sym-link to the file (marked as deleted): $ cd /proc/23521/fd && ls -l Truncate the sym-link to regain your disk space: $ > /proc/23521/fd/3 I should point out that this is pretty brutal and *could* potentially destabilise your system depending on what process the file belongs to that you are truncating.

validate xml in a shell script using xmllint

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

alias to close terminal with :q
Put this in your ~/.bashrc file (or the equivalent) If you use vim a lot, this alias will be immediately obvious. Your brain will thank you.

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)


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