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Retry the previous command until it exits successfully

Shows size of dirs and files, hidden or not, sorted.
Very useful when you need disk space. It calculates the disk usage of all files and dirs (descending them) located at the current directory (including hidden ones). Then sort puts them in order.

grep (or anything else) many files with multiprocessor power
Parallel does not suffer from the risk of mixing of output that xargs suffers from. -j+0 will run as many jobs in parallel as you have cores. With parallel you only need -0 (and -print0) if your filenames contain a '\n'. Parallel is from https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/

List all global top level modles, then remove ALL npm packages with xargs

finding cr-lf files aka dos files with ^M characters
its useful to run dos2unix command later on them.

This is how you should push a string in a command's stdin.
Don't do this: $echo word | command Using a bash "here strings" and "here documents" look leeter than piping echo into the command. Also prevents subshell execution. Word is also expanded as usual.

Base conversions with bc
Easily convert numbers to their representations in different bases. Passing "ibase=16; obase=8; F2A" to bc will convert F2A (3882 in decimal) from Hex to Octal, and so on.

Run a command, redirecting output to a file, then edit the file with vim.
This is one of those 'nothing' shell functions ...which I use all the time. If the command contains spaces, it must be quoted, e.g. $ vimcmd 'svn diff' /tmp/svndiff.out If I want to keep the output of the command that I'm running, I use vimcmd. If I don't need to keep the output, I use this: $ vim

Generate a (compressed) pdf from images
use imagemagik convert

watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals
This command repeatedly gets the specified process' stack using pstack (which is an insanely clever and tiny wrapper for gdb) and displays it fullscreen. Since it updates every second, you rapidly get an idea of where your program is stuck or spending time. The 'tac' is used to make the output grow down, which makes it less jumpy. If the output is too big for your screen, you can always leave the 'tac' off to see the inner calls. (Or, better yet--get a bigger screen.) Caveats: Won't work with stripped binaries and probably not well with threads, but you don't want to strip your binaries or use threads anyway.


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