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Command line calculator
works with fractions like 1/3.5

get header and footer of file for use with scalpel file carving
file carving helps if you know where the file you are looking for starts and ends. It's also an easy way to get data and catalog them for future use with forensic tools like scalpel.

ls not pattern
Negative shell globs already come with bash. Make sure to turn on extended pattern matching with 'shopt -e extglob'.

command line Google I'm Feeling Lucky
opens the Google I'm Feeling Lucky result in lynx, the command line browser

Find the package that installed a command

shuffle lines via perl
Same, without modules... Probably smarter option: just use the shuf command or even sort -R.

Double your disk read performance in a single command
(WARN) This will absolutely not work on all systems, unless you're running large, high speed, hardware RAID arrays. For example, systems using Dell PERC 5/i SAS/SATA arrays. If you have a hardware RAID array, try it. It certainly wont hurt. You may be can test the speed disk with some large file in your system, before and after using this: $ time dd if=/tmp/disk.iso of=/dev/null bs=256k To know the value of block device parameter known as readahead. $ blockdev --getra /dev/sdb And set the a value 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, and maybe 16384... it really depends on the number of hard disks, their speed, your RAID controller, etc. (see sample)

Pack up some files into a tarball on a remote server without writing to the local filesystem
I recently found myself with a filesystem I couldn't write to and a bunch of files I had to get the hell out of dodge, preferably not one at a time. This command makes it possible to pack a bunch of files into a single archive and write it to a remote server.

Cut the first 'N' characters of a line
You can also cut charactes starting from X to N.

A function to find the newest file in a directory


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