Short shell script I call 'delta' - It is useful for groking 'vmstat -s' output (and possibly other commands) to view time-based deltas on each counter.

#!/bin/sh
while :; do
   $* | sed -e 's/^ *//';
   sleep 1;
done 
| awk '
{
   line = substr($0, length($1)+1));

   if (foo[line]) {
      printf("%10d %s\n", $1 - foo[line], line);
   }
   foo[line] = $1;
   fflush();
}'

Example usage:

delta vmstat -s | grep -E 'system calls|fork'

       792  system calls
         3   fork() calls
         0  vfork() calls
       120  pages affected by  fork()
         0  pages affected by vfork()
       680  system calls
         3   fork() calls
         0  vfork() calls
       120  pages affected by  fork()
         0  pages affected by vfork()
      1150  system calls
         3   fork() calls
         0  vfork() calls
       120  pages affected by  fork()
         0  pages affected by vfork()