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Watch the progress of 'dd'
Running this code will execute dd in the background, and you'll grab the process ID with '$!' and assign it to the 'pid' variable. Now, you can watch the progress with the following: $ while true; do kill -USR1 $pid && sleep 1 && clear; done The important thing to grasp here isn't the filename or location of your input or output, or even the block size for that matter, but the fact that you can keep an eye on 'dd' as it's running to see where you are at during its execution.

Generate an XKCD #936 style 4 word passphrase (fast)
Some snippets posted are slow on big dictionaries, this one is fast.

Change host name
With sed you can replace strings on the fly.

Search for a string inside all files in the current directory

Make a dedicated folder for each zip file
${f%*.zip} strips off the extension from zip filenames

ping a host until it responds, then play a sound, then exit
Audio acknowledgement for host availability. When running the command from a Linux systems, you can use "festival" or "espeak" instead of "say".

Numeric zero padding file rename
rename file name with fixed length nomeric format pattern

Adding Color Escape Codes to global CC array for use by echo -e
I was looking for the fastest way to create a bunch of ansi escapes for use in echo -e commands throughout a lot of my shell scripts. This is what I came up with, and I actually stick that loop command in a function and then just call that at the beginning of my scripts to not clutter the environment with these escape codes, which can wreck havok on my terminal when I'm dumping the environment. More of a cool way to store escape ansi codes in an array. You can echo them like: $ echo -e "${CC[15]}This text is black on bright green background." I usually just use with a function: $ # setup_colors - Adds colors to array CC for global use $ # 30 - Black, 31 - Red, 32 - Green, 33 - Yellow, 34 - Blue, 35 - Magenta, 36 - Blue/Green, 37 - White, 30/42 - Black on Green '30\;42' $ function setup_colors(){ declare -ax CC; for i in `seq 0 7`;do ii=$(($i+7));CC[$i]="\033[1;3${i}m";CC[$ii]="\033[0;3${i}m";done;CC[15]="\033[30;42m"; export R='\033[0;00m';export X="\033[1;37m"; }; $ export -f setup_colors CC[15] has a background of bright green which is why it is separate. R resets everything, and X is my default font of bright white. $ CC[15]="\033[30;42m"; R=$'\033[0;00m'; X=$'\033[1;37m' Those are just my favorite colors that I often use in my scripts. You can test which colors by running $ for i in $(seq 0 $((${#CC[@]} - 1))); do echo -e "${CC[$i]}[$i]\n$R"; done See: http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html for more usage.

Number of connections to domains on a cPanel server

from within vi, pipe a chunk of lines to a command line and replace the chunk with the result
The vi key sequence !}command will send the file contents from the cursor to the next blank line as STDOUT to the command specified and replace that sequence of file lines with the output of the command. For example: sorting a block of data - !}sort The sequence !{command will do the same but "upwards" (from the current position towards the start of the file.


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