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Keep track of diff progress
You're running a program that reads LOTS of files and takes a long time. But it doesn't tell you about its progress. First, run a command in the background, e.g. $ find /usr/share/doc -type f -exec cat {} + > output_file.txt Then run the watch command. "watch -d" highlights the changes as they happen In bash: $! is the process id (pid) of the last command run in the background. You can change this to $(pidof my_command) to watch something in particular.

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"

Move cursor to end of line

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

Get count of kilobytes brew cleanup would free

Use Perl like grep
If you've ever tried "grep -P" you know how terrible it is. Even the man page describes it as "highly experimental". This function will let you 'grep' pipes and files using Perl syntax for regular expressions. The first argument is the pattern, e.g. '/foo/'. The second argument is a filename (optional).

Find status of all symlinks
The symlinks command can show status of all symbolic links, including which links are dangling, which symlinks point to files on other file systems, which symlinks use ../ more than necessary, which symlinks are messy (e.g. having too many slashes or dots), etc. Other useful things it can do include removing all dangling links (-d) and converting absolute links to relative links (-c). The path given must be an absolute path (which is why I used $(pwd) in the example command).

automatically ditch old versions in a conflict
This is not exactly a commandline, but a vim macro to automatically ditch the "old" version of a conflict when dealing with the naster

Apply permissions only to files
To apply only to dirs: $ chmod 755 $(find . -type d) Use -R parameters for recursive walk.

Copy modification timestamp from one file to another.


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