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sleep for 1/10s or 1/100s or even 1/1000000s
sleep in microseconds instead of seconds Alternatively to usleep, which is not defined in POSIX 2008 (though it was defined up to POSIX 2004, and it is evidently available on Linux and other platforms with a history of POSIX compliance), the POSIX 2008 standard defines nanosleep

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

continuously check size of files or directories
very handy if you copy or download a/some file(s) and want to know how big it is at the moment

Dump a configuration file without comments or whitespace...
A short, *easy-er* to remember command for stripping whitespace and comments from a config file, (or any file for that matter). Remember regex as: slash, space, star. pound, slash, bar. pointy-hat, dollar. (or "caret, dollar" if you must) :-P

Remove security limitations from PDF documents using ghostscript
Remove security from PDF document using this very simple command on Linux and OSX. You need ghostscript for this baby to work.

sort ugly text
Often, when sorting you want the sort to ignore extraneous characters. The b, d, and f tell sort to ignore leading blanks, use 'dictionary order' (ignore punctuation), and ignore (fold) case. Add a "u" if you only want one copy of duplicate lines. This is a great command to use within vim to sort lines of text, using !}sort -bdf

Display the tree of all instance of a particular process

permanently let grep colorize its output
This will create a permanent alias to colorize the search pattern in your grep output

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

Execute a command with a timeout
I like much more the perl solution, but without using perl. It launches a backgroup process that will kill the command if it lasts too much. A bigger function: check_with_timeout() { [ "$DEBUG" ] && set -x COMMAND=$1 TIMEOUT=$2 RET=0 # Launch command in backgroup [ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 6>&2 # Link file descriptor #6 with stderr. [ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 2> /dev/null # Send stderr to null (avoid the Terminated messages) $COMMAND 2>&1 >/dev/null & COMMAND_PID=$! [ "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Background command pid $COMMAND_PID, parent pid $$" # Timer that will kill the command if timesout sleep $TIMEOUT && ps -p $COMMAND_PID -o pid,ppid |grep $$ | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill & KILLER_PID=$! [ "$DEBUG" ] && echo "Killer command pid $KILLER_PID, parent pid $$" wait $COMMAND_PID RET=$? # Kill the killer timer [ "$DEBUG" ] && ps -e -o pid,ppid |grep $KILLER_PID | awk '{print $1}' | xargs echo "Killing processes: " ps -e -o pid,ppid |grep -v PID | grep $KILLER_PID | awk '{print $1}' | xargs kill wait sleep 1 [ ! "$DEBUG" ] && exec 2>&6 6>&- # Restore stderr and close file descriptor #6. return $RET }


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