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Display disk partition sizes

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Backup all MySQL Databases to individual files
No need to loop when we have `xargs`. The sed command filters out the first line of `show databases` output, which is always "Database".

Retry the previous command until it exits successfully

Runs a command without hangups.
puts command in background and sends its output to nohup.out file it will not die if you log out fromyour shell session ;-)

resolving basic authentication problem(401) with wget
I have a server with a php requiring basic authentication, like this:

Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Set laptop display brightness
Run as root. Path may vary depending on laptop model and video card (this was tested on an Acer laptop with ATI HD3200 video). $ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness to discover the possible values for your display.

Updated top ten memory utilizing processes (child/instance aggregation) now with percentages of total RAM
Prints the top 10 memory consuming processes (with children and instances aggregated) sorted by total RSS and calculates the percentage of total RAM each uses. Please note that since RSS can include shared libraries it is possible for the percentages to add up to more that the total amount of RAM, but this still gives you a pretty good idea. Also note that this does not work with the mawk version of awk, but it works fine with GNU Awk which is on most Linux systems. It also does not work on OS X.

list all files in a directory, sorted in reverse order by modification time, use file descriptors.
It's both silly, and infinitely useful. Especially useful in logfile directories where you want to know what file is being updated while troubleshooting.


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