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Watch how fast the files in a drive are being deleted
This can be useful when a large remove operation is taking place.

Email HTML content
Note, this works because smtp is running

Add 10 random unrated songs to xmms2 playlist
If you're like me and want to keep all your music rated, and you use xmms2, you might like this command. I takes 10 random songs from your xmms2 library that don't have any rating, and adds them to your current playlist. You can then rate them in another xmms2 client that supports rating (I like kuechenstation). I'm pretty sure there's a better way to do the grep ... | sed ... part, probably with awk, but I don't know awk, so I'd welcome any suggestions.

Make a ready-only filesystem ?writeable? by unionfs
First look into /etc/modules if you have unionfs (or squashfs) support. If not, add the modules. UnionFS combines two filesystems. If there is a need to write a file, /tmp/unioncache will be used to write files (first create that directory). Reads will be done where the file is found first. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/SquashFS-HOWTO/creatingandusing.html

Stat each file in a directory
Possible simplification of egrep-awk-sort with find and -exec with xargs.

Efficiently extract lines between markers
GNU Sed can 'address' between two regex, but it continues parsing through to the end of the file. This slight alteration causes it to terminate reading the input file once the STOP match is made. In my example I have included an extra '/START/d' as my 'start' marker line contains the 'stop' string (I'm extracting data between 'resets' and using the time stamp as the 'start'). My previous coding using grep is slightly faster near the end of the file, but overall (extracting all the reset cycles in turn) the new SED method is quicker and a lot neater.

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"

Check whether laptop is running on battery or cable
The original proc file doesn't exist on my system.

Change attributes of files so you can edit them
I had problems in Ubuntu while trying to edit /etc/resolv.conf, even with sudo I couldn't make any change. After a 2 minutes search on google I found this command. Hope someone finds it useful. It works like chmod, with + and - to denote which attributes are being added and which are being removed. See other attributes on man pages or on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattr

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }


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