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Progress bar for MySQL import
Print out the progress of MySQL import using the pv command. Updates every second.

Generic shell function for modifying files in-place
Some commands (such as sed and perl) have options to support in-place editing of files, but many commands do not. This shell function enables any command to change files in place. See the sample output for many examples. The function uses plain sh syntax and works with any POSIX shell or derivative, including zsh and bash.

Get International Space Station sighting information for your city
This command outputs a table of sighting opportunities for the International Space Station. Find the URL for your city here: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/

Display the top 10 running processes - sorted by memory usage
A pretty nice display of processes.

Multi-segment file downloading with lftp
This is for files only, for directories 'mirror' has to be used.

List open files that have no links to them on the filesystem
I have come across a situation in the past where someone has unlinked a file by running an 'rm' command against it while it was still being written to by a running process. The problem manifested itself when a 'df' command showed a filesystem at 100%, but this did not match the total value of a 'du -sk *'. When this happens, the process continues to write to the file but you can no longer see the file on the filesystem. Stopping and starting the process will, more often than not, get rid of the unlinked file, however this is not always possible on a live server. When you are in this situation you can use the 'lsof' command above to get the PID of the process that owns the file (in the sample output this is 23521). Run the following command to see a sym-link to the file (marked as deleted): $ cd /proc/23521/fd && ls -l Truncate the sym-link to regain your disk space: $ > /proc/23521/fd/3 I should point out that this is pretty brutal and *could* potentially destabilise your system depending on what process the file belongs to that you are truncating.

a shell function to print a ruler the width of the terminal window.

Graph # of connections for each hosts.
Written for linux, the real example is how to produce ascii text graphs based on a numeric value (anything where uniq -c is useful is a good candidate).

Slow down the screen output of a command
(example above is the 'ls' command with reduced output speed)

Optimize PDF documents


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