Commands using sh

Change run control links from start "S" to stop "K" (kill) for whatever run levels in curly braces for a service called "myservice". NEWFN variable is for the new filename stored in the in-line shell. Use different list of run levels (rc*.d, rc{1,3,5}.d, etc.) and/or swap S with K in the command to change function of run control links.

I used this command to recursively gather all mp3 files that were previously imported into their own directories (sorted by band name) in Songbird.

Execute this in the root of your music library and this recurses through the directories and normalizes each folder containing mp3s as a batch. This assumes those folders hold an album each. The command "normalize-audio" may go by "normalize" on some systems.

If the remote doesn't export its desktop (eg fluxbox, blackbox etc) then you need to run a x11vnc server there and a vncviewer at the local end. This command does the lot for you - it assumes that you can 'ssh' to the box without a password and that x11vnc is installed at the remote end.

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.

Manages everything through one sed script instead of pipes of greps and awks. Quoting of shell variables is generally easier within a sed script.

this command works with one gziped file per table, and restore 4 tables in parallel.

This command converts filenames with embedded spaces in the current directory replacing spaces with the underscore ("_") character.