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Get me yesterday's date, even if today is 1-Mar-2008 and yesterday was 29-Feb-2008
Fool date by setting the timezone out by 24 hours and you get yesterday's date. Try TZ=XYZ-24 to get tomorrow's date. I live in TZ=GMT0BST so you might need to shift the number 24 by the hours in your timezone.

check open ports without netstat or lsof

Simplified video file renaming
I used this when I had a directory of movies from a camera. I wanted to watch a little of each movie, then rename it depending on what was in the movie. This did the trick for me.

Stop Flash from tracking everything you do.
Brute force way to block all LSO cookies on a Linux system with the non-free Flash browser plugin. Works just fine for my needs. Enjoy.

Convert a string to

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }

Compare a remote file with a local file

escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

View the latest astronomy picture of the day from NASA.
Substitute feh for the image viewer of your choice. display (part of imagemagick) seems to be a popular choice.

Lookup errno defintions
Calls the POSIX strerror() function to look up the meaning of integer ERRNOs set by some functions.


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