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output stats from a running dd command to see its progress
if you start a large dd and forgot about statistics, but you still wonder what the progress is this command in an OTHER terminal will show you the way. NOTE: the watch command by itself will not output anything NOTE: the kill command will not kill the process

tar+pbzip2 a dir

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Some commands (such as netcat) have a port option but how can you know which ports are unused?

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

list files in 'hitlar' mode
Was playing with the shell. It struck to me, just by rearranging the parameters, i was able to remember what they did and in a cool way. Enter the 'hitlar' mode. bash-3.2$ ls -hitlar Shows all items with inodes, in list view, human readable size, sorted by modification time in reverse, bash-3.2$ ls -Fhitlar Shows the same with classification info. Add the hitlar mode alias to your .bashrc. bash-3.2$ echo "alias hitlar='ls -Fhitlar'" >> ~/.bashrc bash-3.2$ hitlar bash-3.2$ hitlar filename

Monitor a file's size

Reduce PDF size

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Resume aborted scp file transfers
Put it into your sh startup script (I use alias scpresume='rsync --partial --progress --rsh=ssh' in bash). When a file transfer via scp has aborted, just use scpresume instead of scp and rsync will copy only the parts of the file that haven't yet been transmitted.

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" }


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