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Copy a file using dc3dd and watch its progress (very nice alternative to dd)
Requires the dc3dd package - available at http://dc3dd.sourceforge.net

Get video information with ffmpeg
ffprobe is specially intended to get video information

Create a zip file ignoring .svn files

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

See The MAN page for the last command
This works in bash. The "!!:0" limits the argument to man to be only the first word of the last command. "!!:1" would be the second, etc.

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Port scan a range of hosts with Netcat.
Simple one-liner for scanning a range of hosts, you can also scan a range of ports with Netcat by ex.: nc -v -n -z -w 1 192.168.0.1 21-443 Useful when Nmap is not available:) Range declaration like X..X "for i in {21..29}" is only works with bash 3.0+

Find all dotfiles and dirs
find makes it easier, filtering . and .. maxdepth could be removed, finding entries recursively. Removing mindepth causes . to appear

Insert an element into xml
This inserts an element as last child under /breakfast_menu/food in simple.xml. xml used - http://www.w3schools.com/xml/simple.xml


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