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Find and delete oldest file of specific types in directory tree
This works on my ubuntu/debian machines. I suspect other distros need some tweaking of sort and cut. I am sure someone could provide a shorter/faster version.

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

FAST Search and Replace for Strings in all Files in Directory
I needed a way to search all files in a web directory that contained a certain string, and replace that string with another string. In the example, I am searching for "askapache" and replacing that string with "htaccess". I wanted this to happen as a cron job, and it was important that this happened as fast as possible while at the same time not hogging the CPU since the machine is a server. So this script uses the nice command to run the sh shell with the command, which makes the whole thing run with priority 19, meaning it won't hog CPU processing. And the -P5 option to the xargs command means it will run 5 separate grep and sed processes simultaneously, so this is much much faster than running a single grep or sed. You may want to do -P0 which is unlimited if you aren't worried about too many processes or if you don't have to deal with process killers in the bg. Also, the -m1 command to grep means stop grepping this file for matches after the first match, which also saves time.

Download entire commandlinefu archive to single file
'jot' does not come with most *nix distros, so we need to use seq to make it work. This version tested good on Fedora 11.

Delete all non-printing characters from a file
tr has some predefined sets of characters that are more convenient to use than characters codes

Renaming a file without overwiting an existing file name
Sometimes in a hurry you may move or copy a file using an already existent file name. If you aliased the cp and mv command with the -i option you are prompted for a confirmation before overwriting but if your aliases aren't there you will loose the target file! The -b option will force the mv command to check if the destination file already exists and if it is already there a backup copy with an ending ~ is created.

Short Information about loaded kernel modules
Run this as root, it will be helpful to quickly get information about the loaded kernel modules.

listen to an offensive fortune
or replace "espeak" with "festival --tts" if you like festival better when your buddy leaves his computer unlocked use "crontab" or "at" to play at some time that would be most embarassing (during his next sales presentation) $ echo "fortune -o | espeak" | at now + 30 minutes of course you can exclude the "-o" for non offensive fortunes, or if you don't have offensive fortunes installed

Clone or rescue a block device
If you use the logfile feature of ddrescue, the data is rescued very efficiently (only the needed blocks are read). Also you can interrupt the rescue at any time and resume it later at the same point. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html


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