Commands using ls (517)

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Do a search-and-replace in a file after making a backup

floating point operations in shell scripts
allows you to use floating point operations in shell scripts

Double your disk read performance in a single command
(WARN) This will absolutely not work on all systems, unless you're running large, high speed, hardware RAID arrays. For example, systems using Dell PERC 5/i SAS/SATA arrays. If you have a hardware RAID array, try it. It certainly wont hurt. You may be can test the speed disk with some large file in your system, before and after using this: $ time dd if=/tmp/disk.iso of=/dev/null bs=256k To know the value of block device parameter known as readahead. $ blockdev --getra /dev/sdb And set the a value 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, and maybe 16384... it really depends on the number of hard disks, their speed, your RAID controller, etc. (see sample)

Shell function to create a menu of items which may be inserted into the X paste buffer.
The function will take a comma separated list of items to be 'selected' by xsel -i: $ smenu "First item to paste,Paste me #2,Third menu item" You will then be prompted to choose one of the menu items. After you choose, you will be able to paste the string by clicking the middle mouse button. The menu will keep prompting you to choose menu items until you break out with Control-C.

Make changes in any profile available immediately/Change to default group
Changes your group to the default group, has the same effect as sourcing your profile/rc file (in any shell) or logging out and back in again.

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.

exit if another instance is running

Gets the X11 Screen resolution
Requires xrandr, grep and, sed.

show git commit history

list files recursively by size


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