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read squid logs with human-readable timestamp

peak amount of memory occupied by any process with "FOO" in its name
Show the maximum amount of memory that was needed by a process at any time. My use case: Having a long-running computation job on $BIG_COMPUTER and judging whether it will also run on $SMALL_COMPUTER.   http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/proc.5.html VmHWM: Peak resident set size ("high water mark")

Copy files from multiple directories into one directory

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Batch edition of all OpenOffice.org Writer files in the current directory (body text)
This function does a batch edition of all OOO3 Writer files in current directory. It uses sed to search a FOO pattern into body text of each file, then replace it to foo pattern (only the first match) . I did it because I've some hundreds of OOO3 Writer files where I did need to edit one word in each ones and open up each file in OOO3 gui wasn't an option. Usage: bsro3 FOO foo

Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there
Sometimes in a script you want to make sure that a directory is in the path, and add it in if it's not already there. In this example, $dir contains the new directory you want to add to the path if it's not already present. There are multiple ways to do this, but this one is a nice clean shell-internal approach. I based it on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1397020. You can also do it using tr to separate the path into lines and grep -x to look for exact matches, like this: $ if ! $(echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://stackoverflow.com/a/5048977. Or replace the "echo | tr" part with a shell parameter expansion, like $ if ! $(echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3209/. There are also other more regex-y ways to do it, but I find the ones listed here easiest to follow. Note some of this is specific to the bash shell.

Play awesome rythmic noise using aplay
Try modifying the numbers in the "(i*(i>>8|i>>9)&46&i>>8))^(i&i>>13|i>>6)" part. Crudely stolen from http://www.xkcdb.com/9067

Empty a file
The downside of output redirection is that you need permissions. So something like $ > file won't play nicely w/ sudo. You'd need to do something like $ bash -c '> file' instead, you could go w/ $ sudo truncate -s0 file

Look for English words in /dev/urandom
* to get the English dictionary: wget http://www.mavi1.org/web_security/wordlists/webster-dictionary.txt

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from


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