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Attach screen over ssh
Directly attach a remote screen session (saves a useless parent bash process)

dd with progress bar and remaining time displayed

Replicate a directory structure dropping the files

most changed files in domains by rdiff-backup output

Find the package that installed a command

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

Hide files in ls, by adding support for .hidden files!
Sometimes I would like to see hidden files, prefix with a period, but some files or folders I never want to see (and really wish I could just remove all together).

shell function to underline a given string.
underline() will print $1, followed by a series of '=' characters the width of $1. An optional second argument can be used to replace '=' with a given character. This function is useful for breaking lots of data emitted in a for loop into sections which are easier to parse visually. Let's say that 'xxxx' is a very common pattern occurring in a group of CSV files. You could run $ grep xxxx *.csv This would print the name of each csv file before each matching line, but the output would be hard to parse visually. $ for i in *.csv; do printf "\n"; underline $i; grep "xxxx" $i; done Will break the output into sections separated by the name of the file, underlined.

Enable ** to expand files recursively (>=bash-4.0)
Since bash 4.0, you can use ** to recursively expand to all files in the current directory. This behaviour is disabled by default, this command enables it (you'd best put it in your .profile). See the sample output for clarification. In my opinion this is much better than creating hacks with find and xargs when you want to pass files to an application.

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


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