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Function to create an alias on the fly
Is used like this: mkalias rmcache "rm -rfv app/cache/*"

power off system in X minutes
Replace 60 with the number of minutes until you want the machine to shut down. Alternatively give an absolute time in the format hh:mm (shutdown -h 9:30) Or shutdown right away (shutdown -h now)

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

Print entire field if string is detected in column
It searches for a specific value in the specified column and if it finds it it'll print the whole field/row. Similarly, if you don't know what you're looking for exactly but want to exclude something you're already aware of, you can exclude that "something: awk '{ if ($column != "string") print $0}'

print crontab entries for all the users that actually have a crontab
This is how I list the crontab for all the users on a given system that actually have a crontab. You could wrap it with a function block and place it in your .profile or .bashrc for quick access. There's prolly a simpler way to do this. Discuss.

Displays the number of unread messages on your gmail at the top right corner of your terminal
Checks your gmail account every 30 seconds and display the number of new messages in the top right corner of the terminal. A kind of CLI "Gmail notifier" if you will. :-) This is a mashup of http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/7916/put-a-console-clock-in-top-right-corner and http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3386/check-your-unread-gmail-from-the-command-line

list files recursively by size

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

Migrate existing Ext3 filesystems to Ext4
Before doing this, back-up all data on any ext3 partitions that are to be converted to ext4. After running previous command you MUST run fsck, is needed to return the filesystem to a consistent state. $ fsck -pDf /dev/yourpartition Edit /etc/fstab and change the 'type' from ext3 to ext4 for any partitions that are converted to ext4.


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