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Generate a (compressed) pdf from images
use imagemagik convert

Watch RX/TX rate of an interface in kb/s
Just a simple way without the need of additional tools. Of course, replace eth0 with your IF.

tar+pbzip2 a dir

Create a bunch of dummy text files

Setting reserved blocks percentage to 1%
According to tune2fs manual, reserved blocks are designed to keep your system from failing when you run out of space. Its reserves space for privileged processes such as daemons (like syslogd, for ex.) and other root level processes; also the reserved space can prevent the filesystem from fragmenting as it fills up. By default this is 5% regardless of the size of the partition. http://www.ducea.com/2008/03/04/ext3-reserved-blocks-percentage/

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Send multiple attachments using mailx
If you're users have ever asked your script to email their reports in separate attachments instead of tar'ring them into one file, then you can use this. You'll need the mailx package of course. In Unix you'd want to add an additional parameter "-m" (uuencode foo.txt foo.txt; uuencode /etc/passwd passwd.txt)|mailx -m -s "Hooosa!" someone@cmdfu.com

Scan a document to PDF
Adjust the --resolution and --mode as required (if these options are available for your scanner). The size options (-x, -y, -imageheight, -imagewidth) are for US letter paper. For A4, I think the command would be: $scanimage -p --resolution 250 --mode Gray -x 210 -y 297 | pnmtops -imageheight 11.7 -imagewidth 8.3 | ps2pdf - output.pdf

Tar files matching a certain wildcard
This is a shortcut to tar up all files matching a wildcard. Tar doesn't have the --include (apparently).

Put uppercase letters in curly brackets in a BibTeX database
It is often recommended to enclose capital letters in a BibTeX file in braces, so the letters will not be transformed to lower case, when imported from LaTeX. This is an attempt to apply this rule to a BibTeX database file. DO NOT USE sed '...' input.bib > input.bib as it will empty the file! How it works: $ /^\s*[^@%]/ Apply the search-and-replace rule to lines that start (^) with zero or more white spaces (\s*), followed by any character ([...]) that is *NOT* a "@" or a "%" (^@%). $ s===g Search (s) for some stuff and replace by other stuff. Do that globally (g) for all matches in each processed line. $ \([A-Z][A-Z]*\)\([^}A-Z]\|},$\) Matches at least one uppercase letter ([A-Z][A-Z]*) followed by a character that is EITHER not "}" and not a capital letter ([^}A-Z]) OR (|) it actually IS a "}", which is followed by "," at the end of the line ($). Putting regular expressions in escaped parentheses (\( and \), respectively) allows to dereference the matched string later. $ {\1}\2 Replace the matched string by "{", followed by part 1 of the matched string (\1), followed by "}", followed by the second part of the matched string (\2). I tried this with GNU sed, only, version 4.2.1.


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