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

tar pipe to copy files, alternate to cp -Ra
uses tar to dump files from /orignl/path to /dst/dir. i find tar's out more readable than cp, and it doesn't mess with modified dates.

Generate Sha1, MD5 hash using echo
This is mostly for my own notes but this command will compute a md5 message digest from the command line. You can also replace md5sum with other checksum commands (e.g., sha1sum)

Search some text from all files inside a directory

Filter the output of a file continously using tail and grep
The OPs solution will work, however on some systems (bsd), grep will not filter the data, unless the --line-buffered option is enabled.

Show linux kernel modules dependencies
Use modprobe to list all the dependencies of a certain kernel module. Handy when debugging system issues.

Merge some PDF files into a single one

Compute running average for a column of numbers
This is an on-line algorithm for calculating the mean value for numbers in a column. Also known as "running average" or "moving average".

recursively change file name from uppercase to lowercase (or viceversa)
or, to process a single directory: $ for f in *; do mv $f `echo $f |tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; done

Execute a command before display the bash prompt
For example, if you are the type who type ls very often, then $ PROMPT_COMMAND=ls will ls after every command you issue.


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