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A line across the entire width of the terminal
Use tput cols to find the width of the terminal and set it as the minimum field width.

list files recursively by size

Updating to Fedora 11

convert single digit to double digits
each number in a file name gets expanded to the number of digets provided as arg_1 of the arguments in rjust_file_nums. Put the funciton in the .bashrc file. Be sure to $ source ~/.bashrc so that the function will be accessible from bash.

More precise BASH debugging

View user activity per directory.
View all files opened by a user in specified directory. The +D option makes lsof search all sub-directories to complete depth, while ignoring symbolic links.

Extract audio stream from an video file using mencoder
This command extracts the audio stream of the video in $file and stores it in a file where the original suffix is changed to .mp3

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available
Any changes to BASH shell made in .bashrc will be active in the current terminal window from the moment you execute this command, ie. aliases, prompt settings etc. No need to restart terminal. (In BASH 'source' simile to 'eval' lets you generally execute any bunch of commands stacked in a text file).

Search recursively to find a word or phrase in certain file types, such as C code
I have a bash alias for this command line and find it useful for searching C code for error messages. The -H tells grep to print the filename. you can omit the -i to match the case exactly or keep the -i for case-insensitive matching. This find command find all .c and .h files

cat a file backwards
Or "tail -r" on Solaris.


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