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remove comments (even those starting with spaces), empty lines (even those containing spaces) in one grep command
useful for discarding even those comments which start with blanks or those empty lines which contain blanks

gawk gets fixed width field

Show this month's calendar, with today's date highlighted
Explanation: * The date command evaluated to today's date with blank padded on the left if single digit * The grep command search and highlight today's date * The --before-context and --after-context flags displays up to 6 lines before and after the line containing today's date; thus completes the calendar. I have tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard and Xubuntu 8.10

Setting reserved blocks percentage to 1%
According to tune2fs manual, reserved blocks are designed to keep your system from failing when you run out of space. Its reserves space for privileged processes such as daemons (like syslogd, for ex.) and other root level processes; also the reserved space can prevent the filesystem from fragmenting as it fills up. By default this is 5% regardless of the size of the partition. http://www.ducea.com/2008/03/04/ext3-reserved-blocks-percentage/

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

simple port check command

Backup a filesystem to a remote machine and use cstream to throttle bandwidth of the backup
This command will nicely dump a filesystem to STDOUT, compress it, encrypt it with the gpg key of your choice, throttle the the data stream to 60kb/s and finally use ssh to copy the contents to an image on a remote machine.

Rename files in batch

Create a new file

record the input of your sound card into ogg file
save the input into a ogg file


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