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View non-printing characters with cat
Useful to detect number of tabs in an empty line, DOS newline (carriage return + newline). A tool that can help you understand why your parsing is not working.

Play radio stream with mplayer
Above command will play Virgin Radio Dubai

Add .gitignore files to all empty directories recursively from your current directory

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Streaming HTML5 video to icecast server using dvgrab, ffmpeg2theora and oggfwd
Streaming HTML5 compatible video (Ogg Theora video with Vorbis sound) to an Icecast server using dvgrab, ffmpeg2theora and oggfwd. In this example I'm merging stereo sound to mono (-c 1), saving the original dv for later higher quality on-demand video (tee dvstream.dv), saving the theora stream for immediate on-demand video, and publishing the stream in Xiph's stream directory (-p and the name and description). The URL of the video will be (depending on your server) http://my.icecastserver.com/stream.ogv which will play in newer Firefox, Chrome and Opera web browsers. Cortado (a Java player) can easily be used for IE. Note also that I'm using port 80, which is not the default port for Icecast, this is to avoid restrictive firewalls. Also note that ffmpeg2theora 0.25 and will heed the bitrates much better than former versions because of using libtheora 1.1 or newer.

Replace Solaris vmstat numbers with human readable format
% cat ph-vmstat.awk # Return human readable numbers function hrnum(a) { b = a ; if (a > 1000000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fM", a/1000000) ; } else if (a > 1000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fK", a/1000) ; } return(b) ; } # Return human readable storage function hrstorage(a) { b = a ; if (a > 1024000) { b = sprintf("%2.2fG", a/1024/1024) ; } else if (a > 1024) { b = sprintf("%2.2fM", a/1024) ; } return(b) ; } OFS=" " ; $1 !~ /[0-9].*/ {print} $1 ~ /[0-9].*/ { $4 = hrstorage($4) ; $5 = hrstorage($5) ; $9 = hrnum($9) ; $10 = hrnum($10) ; $17 = hrnum($17) ; $18 = hrnum($18) ; $19 = hrnum($19) ; print ; }

Rename files in batch

tar exclude files or directories
If you want to exclude only one file or directory you should use as --exclude=file_or_directory

Automatically find and re-attach to a detached screen session
man screen: "-D -R Attach here and now. In detail this means: If a session is running, then reattach. If necessary detach and logout remotely first. If it was not running create it and notify the user. This is the author?s favorite."

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from
This works even if there are spaces in any word in the command line.


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