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Transfer a file to multiple hosts over ssh
You can push files to up to 32 servers at once assuming ssh keys are in place. Great tool, it is part of the pssh suite.

Numeric zero padding file rename
This uses Perl's rename utility (you may have to call it as prename on your box) and won't choke on spaces or other characters in filenames. It will also zero pad a number even in filenames like "vacation-4.jpg".

Get the header of a website

Never rewrites a file while copying (or moving)
Allows you to preserve your files when using cp, mv, ln, install or patch. When the target file exists, it will generate a file named XXX.~N~ (N is an auto-incremental number) instead of deleting the target file.

clean up memory of unnecessary things (Kernerl 2.6.16 or newer)
run sync first to flush useful things out to disk!!! To free pagecache: echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To free dentries and inodes: echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches To free pagecache, dentries and inodes: echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

sort ugly text
Often, when sorting you want the sort to ignore extraneous characters. The b, d, and f tell sort to ignore leading blanks, use 'dictionary order' (ignore punctuation), and ignore (fold) case. Add a "u" if you only want one copy of duplicate lines. This is a great command to use within vim to sort lines of text, using !}sort -bdf

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Output sound when your computer is downloading something
Outputs pseudo-random sounds to speakers (stereo mode because of -c 2) when there are any kind of network activity.

Takes and displays screenshot of Android phone over adb.
Dependencies on phone: adb access, screencap command, base64 command. Dependencies on computer: adb, sed, base64, display (from imagemagick, but can substitute other image viewer which reads from stdin). This should work around adb stupidies (i.e. that it replaces \n with \r\n) with base64.

Top ten memory hogs
Inspired by #7065


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