VMware PowerCLI allows us to shutdown a guest operating system on a virtual machine (assuming VMTools are installed) but the command to do this- Shutdown-VMGuest -returns straight away. In a script we may wish to wait for the VM to power down before continuing, this can be done as follows.
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In Linux the wc -l command gives a count of the number of lines in a file or pipe. Windows doesn’t have the wc command, but the same can be done using the built-in find command as follows:
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In Windows XP, the Scheduled Tasks system only offers the choice of “Daily”, “Weekly”, “Monthly”, “Once” or when the computer starts or the user logs on. It’s possible, however, to schedule tasks to occur much more frequently, for example every 15 minutes.
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When using an OnSelectedIndexChanged event on a drop down list in an ASP.NET page, the event code wasn’t getting executed.
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Brief instructions on how to make a USB flash drive that can boot a computer into Windows 98 DOS mode. Useful for running things like Norton Ghost.
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A quick line of code for displaying how many copies of an application are running on a Linux platform: 1ps -ef | grep myapplicationname | wc -l | awk ' { print $1-1 } '

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This cgi script allows you to post a webpage on your multi-processor Linux server which shows the current CPU usage. Useful if you want to quickly and easily check the load on the system and see if multi-processor applications are spreading themselves across the available cores.
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I have an old (virtual) server which, for various support and compatibility reasons, is still running Fedora Core 2 Linux, released back in 2005. Despite this being an old, unsupported, version of the OS I wanted it to be as up-to-date as possible, and this is how I went about it.
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By default on a Windows XP pressing the Shift Key 5 times in a row turns on StickyKeys and brings up the warning dialog. In normal operation this doesn’t happen very often, but if you’re bashing someone with your rifle in Call of Duty it can pull you out of the game to show this dialog.

Normally you click …

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