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Catch a proccess from a user and strace it.
It sits there in a loop waiting for a proccess from that user to spawn. When it does it will attach strace to it

Summarize Apache Extended server-status to show longest running requests
Ever need to know why Apache is bogging down *right now*? Hate scanning Apache's Extended server-status for the longest running requests? Me, too. That's why I use this one liner to quickly find suspect web scripts that might need review. Assuming the Extended server-status is reachable at the target URL desired, this one-liner parses the output through elinks (rendering the HTML) and shows a list of active requests sorted by longest running request at the bottom of the list. I include the following fields (as noted in the header line): Seconds: How long the request is alive PID: Process ID of the request handler State: State of the request, limited to what I think are the relevant ones (GCRK_.) IP: Remote Host IP making the request Domain: Virtual Host target (HTTP/1.1 Host: header). Important for Virtual Hosting servers TYPE: HTTP verb URL: requested URL being served. Putting this in a script that runs when triggered by high load average can be quite revealing. Can also capture "forgotten" scripts being exploited such as "formmail.pl", etc.

Find the package that installed a command

mplayer webcam window for screencasts
When recording screencast some people like to have the image from their webcam, so the can show something, that can't be seen on the desktop. So starting mplayer with these parameters you will have a window with no frames, borders whatsoever, and selecting the window a hitting the "F" key you will bring it in fullscreen. if you want to position the frame somewhere else, you could play with the --geomeptry option where 100%:100% mean bottom right corner. The HEIGHT and WIDTH can't be changed as you like, since the most webcams support specified dimensions, so you would have to play with it to see what is supported

Remove lines that contain a specific pattern($1) from file($2).
The -i option in sed allows in-place editing of the input file. Replace myexpression with any regular expression. /expr/d syntax means if the expression matches then delete the line. You can reverse the functionality to keep matching lines only by using: $ sed -i -n '/myexpression/p' /path/to/file.txt

Rename files in batch

clone an USB stick using dd + see its process
The following command will clone usb stick inside /dev/sdc to /dev/sdd Double check you got the correct usb sticks (origional-clone)with fdisk -l.

One line Perl Script to determine the largest file sizes on a Linux Server
This one line Perl script will display the smallest to the largest files sizes in all directories on a server.

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" }

Perl one liner for epoch time conversion
Converts Unix epoch time to localtime. Useful for any logs that only display epoch time.


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