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dd with progress bar
piping through 'pv' shows a simple progress/speed bar for dd. This is a replacement for my otherwise favorite 'while :;do killall -USR1 dd;sleep 1;done'

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Create a video screencast (capture screen) of screen portion, with audio (the audio you hear, not your mic)
Errors in output don't matter. Stop recording: ctrl-c. Result playable with Flash too. IMPORTANT: Find a Pulse Audio device to capture from: pactl list | grep -A2 'Source #' | grep 'Name: ' | cut -d" " -f2

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy

Check reverse DNS
The +short option should make dig less chatty.

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

An easter egg built into python to give you the Zen of Python

Delete empty directories with zsh
This command uses the recursive glob and glob qualifiers from zsh. This will remove all the empty directories from the current directory down. The **/* recurses down through all the files and directories The glob qualifiers are added into the parenthesis. The / means only directories. The F means 'full' directories, and the ^ reverses that to mean non-full directories. For more info on these qualifiers see the zsh docs: http://zsh.dotsrc.org/Doc/Release/Expansion.html#SEC87

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

Clean swap area after using a memory hogging application
When you run a memory intensive application (VirtualBox, large java application, etc) swap area is used as soon as memory becomes insufficient. After you close the program, the data in swap is not put back on memory and that decreases the responsiveness. Swapoff disables the swap area and forces system to put swap data be placed in memory. Since running without a swap area might be detrimental, swapon should be used to activate swap again. Both swapoff and swapon require root privileges.


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