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Pulls total current memory usage, including SWAP being used, by all active processes.

Fix borked character coding in a tty.
Often you find some tty programs are messed up and confused about character encoding - 'man' is a common problem and sometimes displays weird characters for apostrophes, hyphens etc etc. Another class of programs that suffer from this are those that try to use the line drawing characters - eg RedHat's tty system admin functions such as system-config-firewall-tui system-config-network-tui etc. Adding 'LC_ALL=C' fixes most of these problems (as long as you want English! Perhaps speakers of other languages can add a comment here). For bonus points, I've added the '-c' option to the man command so that it ignores it's cache and re-computes the man page using the C locale.

Find out which process uses an old lib and needs a restart after a system update
Shows the full output of lsof.

Watch the progress of 'dd'
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on

Programmatic way to find and set your timezone

listen to an offensive fortune
or replace "espeak" with "festival --tts" if you like festival better when your buddy leaves his computer unlocked use "crontab" or "at" to play at some time that would be most embarassing (during his next sales presentation) $ echo "fortune -o | espeak" | at now + 30 minutes of course you can exclude the "-o" for non offensive fortunes, or if you don't have offensive fortunes installed

Speed up launch of liferea
If you use liferea frequently, you will see obvious speedup after you executed this command.

Opens files containing search term in vim with search term highlighted
Takes the same arguments that ack does. E.g. ack-open -i "searchterm" opens all files below the current directory containing the search term. The search term is also highlighted within vim if you have hlsearch set. Works on zsh, unsure if it works on bash. Note: ubuntu users have to change ack to ack-grep unless you already have it aliased (as I do)

Counting the source code's line numbers C/C++ Java
Count your source and header file's line numbers. This ignores blank lines, C++ style comments, single line C style comments. This will not ignore blank lines with tabs or multiline C style comments.

Pause Current Thread
Hold ctrl and press z to pause the current thread. Run $fg to resume it.


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