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Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

list files recursively by size

Wait for file to stop changing
Here's a way to wait for a file (a download, a logfile, etc) to stop changing, then do something. As written it will just return to the prompt, but you could add a "; echo DONE" or whatever at the end. This just compares the full output of "ls" every 10 seconds, and keeps going as long as that output has changed since the last interval. If the file is being appended to, the size will change, and if it's being modified without growing, the timestamp from the "--full-time" option will have changed. The output of just "ls -l" isn't sufficient since by default it doesn't show seconds, just minutes. Waiting for a file to stop changing is not a very elegant or reliable way to measure that some process is finished - if you know the process ID there are much better ways. This method will also give a false positive if the changes to the target file are delayed longer than the sleep interval for any reason (network timeouts, etc). But sometimes the process that is writing the file doesn't exit, rather it continues on doing something else, so this approach can be useful if you understand its limitations.

watch your network load on specific network interface
-n means refresh frequency you could change eth0 to any interface you want, like wlan0

Search for a single file and go to it
This command looks for a single file named emails.txt which is located somewhere in my home directory and cd to that directory. This command is especially helpful when the file is burried deep in the directory structure. I tested it against the bash shells in Xubuntu 8.10 and Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6

Use vim automation to create a colorized html file

Recursive grep of all c++ source under the current directory

ls not pattern
Hides some entries from listing.

How to secure delete a file
Instead, install apt-get install secure-delete and you can use: -- srm to delete file and directory on hard disk -- smem to delete file in RAM -- sfill to delete "free space" on hard disk -- sswap to delete all data from swap

send DD a signal to print its progress
Sends the "USR1" signal every 1 second (-n 1) to a process called exactly "dd". The signal in some systems can be INFO or SIGINFO ... look at the signals list in: man kill


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