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Show the disk usage for files pointed by symbolic link in a directory
You also can sum the file usage of all files $ find /usr/lib -maxdepth 1 -type l -print0 | xargs -r0 du -Lch

reset an hanging terminal session
when your terminal session seems unrensponsive (this normally happen after outputting some binary data directly on your standard output) it may me saned by hitting: CTRL+J tput sgr0 CTRL+J Note: don't press the Enter key, just ctrl+j

Parse a quoted .csv file
The $2, $3, $4 fields are arbitrary but note that the first field starts from $2 and the last field is $NF-1. This is due to the fact that the leading and trailing quotes are treated as field delimiters.

tar.gz with gpg-encryption on the fly
Create a encrypted tar.gz file from a directory on the fly. The encryption is done by GPG with a public key. The resulting filename is tagged with the date of creation. Very usefull for encrypted snapshots of folders.

print java packages by using unix tree and sed
if you need a quick way of printing out all the packages that contain classes this command will print the directory structure and replace '/' with '.' It will also ignore CVS directories (we use CVS here)

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

list files recursively by size

Change Gnome wallpaper
You can use this in a script which rotates wallpapers from a directory at each login.

List all active access_logs for currently running Apache or Lighttpd process
Ever logged into a *nix box and needed to know which webserver is running and where all the current access_log files are? Run this one liner to find out. Works for Apache or Lighttpd as long as CustomLog name is somewhat standard. HINT: works great as input into for loop, like this: $ for i in `lsof -p $(netstat -ltpn|awk '$4 ~ /:80$/ {print substr($7,1,index($7,"/")-1)}')| awk '$9 ~ /access.log$/ {print $9| "sort -u"}'` ; do echo $i; done Very useful for triage on unfamiliar servers!

Colorize svn stat
Use color escape sequences and sed to colorize the output of svn stat -u. Colors: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/colorizing.html svn stat characters: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.html#svn.ref.svn.c.status GNU Extensions for Escapes in Regular Expressions: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Escapes.html


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