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Figure out what shell you're running

easily find megabyte eating files or directories

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

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"

View internet connection activity in a browser
The output of lsof is piped to txt2html which converts it to html. # Perl module HTML::TextToHTML needed

Updating to Fedora 11

Create a simple playlist sort by Genre using mp3info

Quickly create an alias for changing into the current directory

Backticks are evil
This is a simple example of using proper command nesting using $() over ``. There are a number of advantages of $() over backticks. First, they can be easily nested without escapes: $ program1 $(program2 $(program3 $(program4))) versus $ program1 `program2 \`program3 \`program4\`\`` Second, they're easier to read, then trying to decipher the difference between the backtick and the singlequote: `'. The only drawback $() suffers from is lack of total portability. If your script must be portable to the archaic Bourne shell, or old versions of the C-shell or Korn shell, then backticks are appropriate, otherwise, we should all get into the habit of $(). Your future script maintainers will thank you for producing cleaner code.

wc in perl


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