Commands by Ikem (1)

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Watch the progress of 'dd'
run this in another terminal, were xxxx is the process ID of the running dd process. the progress will report on the original terminal that you ran dd on

Suppress output of loud commands you don't want to hear from

Show the command line for a PID with ps
Show the command line for a PID with ps

list files recursively by size

Extract rpm package name, version and release using some fancy sed regex
This command could seem pretty pointless especially when you can get the same result more easily using the rpm builtin queryformat, like: $ rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME} %{VERSION} %{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n" | sort | column -t but nonetheless I've learned that sometimes it can be quite interesting trying to explore alternative ways to accomplish the same task (as Perl folks like to say: There's more than one way to do it!)

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.

Check a nfs mountpoint and force a remount if it does not reply after a given timeout.
Based on the execute with timeout command in this site. A more complex script: #!/bin/sh # This script will check the avaliability of a list of NFS mount point, # forcing a remount of those that do not respond in 5 seconds. # # It basically does this: # NFSPATH=/mountpoint TIMEOUT=5; perl -e "alarm $TIMEOUT; exec @ARGV" "test -d $NFSPATH" || (umount -fl $NFSPATH; mount $NFSPATH) # TIMEOUT=5 SCRIPT_NAME=$(basename $0) for i in $@; do echo "Checking $i..." if ! perl -e "alarm $TIMEOUT; exec @ARGV" "test -d $i" > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo "$SCRIPT_NAME: $i is failing with retcode $?."1>&2 echo "$SCRIPT_NAME: Submmiting umount -fl $i" 1>&2 umount -fl $i; echo "$SCRIPT_NAME: Submmiting mount $i" 1>&2 mount $i; fi done

Go up multiple levels of directories quickly and easily.
Change to your taste. Much quicker than having to add 'cd' every time. Add it to your .bashrc or .bash_profile.

wc in perl

View All Processess Cmdlines and Environments
Grabs the cmdline used to execute the process, and the environment that the process is being run under. This is much different than the 'env' command, which only lists the environment for the shell. This is very useful (to me at least) to debug various processes on my server. For example, this lets me see the environment that my apache, mysqld, bind, and other server processes have. Here's a function I use: $ aa_ps_all () { ( cd /proc && command ps -A -opid= | xargs -I'{}' sh -c 'test $PPID -ne {}&&test -r {}/cmdline&&echo -e "\n[{}]"&&tr -s "\000" " "

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