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lazy SQL QUERYING
This is regarding the command 8263 using an alias to fill in command line options for psql. You can actually just type 'psql'. In order for that to work, you want to set environment variables PGDATABASE, PGHOST, PGUSER, and (except you're using the default) PGPORT. Also, you can add a line "host:port:dbname:user:password" (asterisk ok in some columns) to your ~/.pgpass file. Finally, if you don't like the aligned columns, you can add the line "\pset format unaligned" to your ~/.psqlrc file.

Display the top ten running processes - sorted by memory usage

Watch the progress of 'dd'
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript (for Windows)
#4345 also works under windows

echo something backwards
NAME rev - reverse lines of a file or files SYNOPSIS rev [file ...] DESCRIPTION The rev utility copies the specified files to the standard output, reversing the order of characters in every line. If no files are specified, the standard input is read. AVAILABILITY The rev command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.

Configure a serial line device so you can evaluate it with a shell script
I had a hard time in finding the correct settings to get reasonable output from a coin selector which sends its data over a serial line. In the end, minicom came to the rescue and pointed me on the right track. So, if you need to do something similar, these settings may help you. Replace ttyUSB0 with your device file, 9600 with your baud rate, 5 with your read timeout (10ths of a second), and 1 with the minimum numbers of characters you want to read. You can then open the device file like you are used to do, example: $ DATA="`xxd -ps -l 5 \"$DEV\"`"

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Found how how much memory in kB $PID is occupying in Linux
The "proportional set size" is probably the closest representation of how much active memory a process is using in the Linux virtual memory stack. This number should also closely represent the %mem found in ps(1), htop(1), and other utilities.

execute your commands hiding secret bits from history records
$ wget --user=username --password="$password" http://example.org/ Instead of hiding commands entirely from history, I prefer to use "read" to put the password into a variable, and then use that variable in the commands instead of the password. Without the "-e" and "-s" it should work in any bourne-type shell, but the -s is what makes sure the password doesn't get echoed to the screen at all. (-e makes editing work a bit better)


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