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exclude file(s) from rsync
rsyncs files to a server excluding listed files also a file can be used to exclude common exclude rules and/or to exclude a ton of files, like so: $rsync --exclude-from '~/.scripts/exclude.txt' where exclude.txt has one rule per line: *.mp3 *.svn*

Find the package that installed a command

Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Checks the Gmail ATOM feed for your account, parses it and outputs a list of unread messages. For some reason sed gets stuck on OS X, so here's a Perl version for the Mac: $ curl -u username:password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" | tr -d '\n' | awk -F '' '{for (i=2; i

Unzip and untar a *.tar.gz file in one go to a specific directory
A *.tar.gz file needs to be unzipped & then untarred. Previously I might have unzipped first with $gunzip -d file.tar.gz and then untarred the result with $tar -xvf file.tar (Options are extract, verbose, file) Using the -z (decompress) option on tar avoids the use of gzip (or gunzip) first. Additionally the -C option will specify the directory to extract to.

Convert (almost) any video file into webm format for online html5 streaming

kill some pids without specific pid
pgrep, pkill - look up or signal processes based on name and other attributes

show dd progress
if you need see progress of long dd command, enter subj on other console

Monitor Linux/MD RAID Rebuild

Scan for new SCSI devices
Issues a scan command on the given scsi host adapter (ex. a fibre channel adapter, in the example above on host0). Output can be watched in the messages log or in "dmesg"

Clean your broken terminal
When some console full-screen program (minicom, vi, some installers) breaks down your terminal, try this command to revert all options to "sane" settings (sane is a built-in combo of a lot of stty options)


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