cat? dd? RTFM

This command lets you see and scroll through all of the strings that are stored in the RAM at any given time. Press space bar to scroll through to see more pages (or use the arrow keys etc). Sometimes if you don't save that file that you were working on or want to get back something you closed it can be found floating around in here! The awk command only shows lines that are longer than 20 characters (to avoid seeing lots of junk that probably isn't "human readable"). If you want to dump the whole thing to a file replace the final '| less' with '> memorydump'. This is great for searching through many times (and with the added bonus that it doesn't overwrite any memory...). Here's a neat example to show up conversations that were had in pidgin (will probably work after it has been closed)... sudo cat /proc/kcore | strings | grep '([0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\}:[0-9]\{2\})' (depending on sudo settings it might be best to run sudo su first to get to a # prompt)

Best result when file size less than half of RAM size

This will show the amount of physical RAM that is left unused by the system. Show Sample Output

Here we instead show a more real figure for how much free RAM you have when taking into consideration buffers that can be freed if needed. Unix machines leave data in memory but marked it free to overwrite, so using the first line from the "free" command will mostly give you back a reading showing you are almost out of memory, but in fact you are not, as the system can free up memory as soon as it is needed. I just noticed the free command is not on my OpenBSD box. Show Sample Output

Creates a temporary ram partition To use: ram 3 to make a 3gb partition (Defaults to 1gb) Show Sample Output

dbus-send --system --print-reply --dest="org.freedesktop.UPower" /org/freedesktop/UPower org.freedesktop.UPower.Suspend

makes more sense to customers XD Show Sample Output

Does not output the word "shared" so you can easily store this number in a variable. Show Sample Output

Advanced information about RAM.

This is an useful command for when your OS is reporting less free RAM than it actually has. In case terminated processes did not free their variables correctly, the previously allocated RAM might make a bit sluggis over time. This command then creates a huge file made out of zeroes and then removes it, thus freeing the amount of memory occupied by the file in the RAM. In this example, the sequence will free up to 1GB(1M * 1K) of unused RAM. This will not free memory which is genuinely being used by active processes.