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Run TOP in Color, split 4 ways for x seconds - the ultimate ps command. Great for init scripts
One of my favorite ways to impress newbies (and old hats) to the power of the shell, is to give them an incredibly colorful and amazing version of the top command that runs once upon login, just like running fortune on login. It's pretty sweet believe me, just add this one-liner to your ~/.bash_profile -- and of course you can set the height to be anything, from 1 line to 1000! $ G=$(stty -g);stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2));top -n1; stty $G;unset G Doesn't take more than the below toprc file I've added below, and you get all 4 top windows showing output at the same time.. each with a different color scheme, and each showing different info. Each window would normally take up 1/4th of your screen when run like that - TOP is designed as a full screen program. But here's where you might learn something new today on this great site.. By using the stty command to change the terminals internal understanding of the size of your terminal window, you force top to also think that way as well. # save the correct settings to G var. $ G=$(stty -g) # change the number of rows to half the actual amount, or 50 otherwise $ stty rows $((${LINES:-50}/2)) # run top non-interactively for 1 second, the output stays on the screen (half at least) $ top -n1 # reset the terminal back to the correct values, and clean up after yourself $ stty $G;unset G This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ], though the online version will be updated soon. Just think what else you could run like this! Note 1: I had to edit the toprc file out due to this site can't handle that (uploads/including code). So you can grab it from [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash-power-prompt.html my site ] Note 2: I had to come back and edit again because the links weren't being correctly parsed

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.

Using a single sudo to run multiple && arguments
This will also work with bash instead of sh shell sudo bash -c 'apt update -y && apt upgrade -y'

convert single digit to double digits
each number in a file name gets expanded to the number of digets provided as arg_1 of the arguments in rjust_file_nums. Put the funciton in the .bashrc file. Be sure to $ source ~/.bashrc so that the function will be accessible from bash.

Make a thumbnail image of first page of a PDF.
convert is included in ImageMagick. Don't forget the [X] (where X is the page number). [0] is the first page of the PDF.

Print interface that is up and running

Get duration of an audio file in seconds.
This is an alternative to #9131. ffmpeg didn't work on my .au files, though it did on the .wav ones. Also useful if you don't have ffmpeg but do have sox. Handily, sox already reports in seconds (decimal).

Detect illegal access to kernel space, potentially useful for Meltdown detection
Based on capsule8 agent examples, not rigorously tested

"Clone" a list of installed packages from one Debian/Ubuntu Server to another

extract column from csv file
extracts the 5th column using the delimiter ','


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