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Buffer in order to avoir mistakes with redirections that empty your files
A common mistake in Bash is to write command-line where there's command a reading a file and whose result is redirected to that file. It can be easily avoided because of : 1) warnings "-bash: file.txt: cannot overwrite existing file" 2) options (often "-i") that let the command directly modify the file but I like to have that small function that does the trick by waiting for the first command to end before trying to write into the file. Lots of things could probably done in a better way, if you know one...

bash or tcsh redirect both to stdout and to a file
When plumbers use pipes, they sometimes need a T-joint. The Unix equivalent to this is 'tee'. The -a flag tells 'tee' to append to the file, rather than clobbering it. Tested on bash and tcsh.

Create a file of a given size in linux
if the fs support sparse file,using truncate can create sparse file. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_file

Clean all .pyc files from current project. It cleans all the files recursively.

PDF simplex to duplex merge
Joins two pdf documents coming from a simplex document feed scanner. Needs pdftk >1.44 w/ shuffle.

Extract extention of a file

Monitor all DNS queries made by Firefox Mac OS X version

Remove all backup files in my home directory
I use this simple command for remove all backup files generated usually by editors like Vim and Emacs.

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 shared library dependencies
May be used on (embedded) systems lack ldd


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