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Efficient count files in directory (no recursion)
$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){@a=readdir D;print $#a - 1,"\n"}' 205413 real 0m0.497s user 0m0.220s sys 0m0.268s $ time { ls |wc -l; } 205413 real 0m3.776s user 0m3.340s sys 0m0.424s ********* ** EDIT: turns out this perl liner is mostly masturbation. this is slightly faster: $ find . -maxdepth 1 | wc -l sh-3.2$ time { find . -maxdepth 1|wc -l; } 205414 real 0m0.456s user 0m0.116s sys 0m0.328s ** EDIT: now a slightly faster perl version $ perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' sh-3.2$ time perl -e 'if(opendir D,"."){++$c foreach readdir D}print $c-1,"\n"' 205414 real 0m0.415s user 0m0.176s sys 0m0.232s

find which of the zip files contains the file you're searching for
This command find which of your zip (or jar) files (when you have lots of them) contains a file you're searching for. It's useful when you have a lot of zip (or jar) files and need to know in which of them the file is archived. It's most common with .jar files when you have to know which of the .jar files contains the java class you need. To find in jar files, you must change "zip" to "jar" in the "find" command. The [internal file name] must be changed to the file name you're searching that is archived into one of the zip/jar files. Before run this command you must step into the directory that contains the zip or jar files.

Save man pages to pdf

GREP a PDF file.
PDF files are simultaneously wonderful and heinous. They are wonderful in being ubiquitous and mostly being cross platform. They are heinous in being very difficult to work with from the command line, search, grep, use only the text inside the PDF, or use outside of proprietary products. xpdf is a wonderful set of PDF tools. It is on many linux distros and can be installed on OS X. While primarily an open PDF viewer for X, xpdf has the tool "pdftotext" that can extract formated or unformatted text from inside a PDF that has text. This text stream can then be further processed by grep or other tool. The '-' after the file name directs output to stdout rather than to a text file the same name as the PDF. Make sure you use version 3.02 of pdftotext or later; earlier versions clipped lines. The lines extracted from a PDF without the "-layout" option are very long. More paragraphs. Use just to test that a pattern exists in the file. With "-layout" the output resembles the lines, but it is not perfect. xpdf is available open source at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

Check to make sure the whois nameservers match the nameserver records from the nameservers themselves
Change the $domain variable to whichever domain you wish to query. Works with the majority of whois info; for some that won't, you may have to compromise: domain=google.com; for a in $(whois $domain | grep "Domain servers in listed order:" --after 3 | grep -v "Domain servers in listed order:"); do echo ">>> Nameservers for $domain from $a

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Resolve the "all display buffers are busy, please try later" error on a Foundry

which procs have $PATH_REGEX open?
faster than lsof by at least x2 on my box.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

autossh + ssh + screen = super rad perma-sessions
Only useful for really flakey connections (but im stuck with one for now). Though if youre in this situation ive found this to be a good way to run autossh and it does a pretty good job of detecting when the session is down and restarting. Combined with the -t and screen commands this pops you back into your working session lickety split w/ as few headaches as possible. And if autossh is a bit slow at detecting the downed ssh connection, just run this in another tab/terminal window to notify autossh that it should drop it and start over. Basically for when polling is too slow. kill -SIGUSR1 `pgrep autossh`


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