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Print a row of characters across the terminal
Pure Bash This will print a row of characters the width of the screen without using any external executables. In some cases, COLUMNS may not be set. Here is an alternative that uses tput to generate a default if that's the case. And it still avoids using tr. $ printf -v row "%${COLUMNS:-$(tput cols)}s"; echo ${row// /#} The only disadvantage to either one is that they create a variable.

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.

generate a randome 10 character password

for too many arguments by *
$ grep ERROR *.log -bash: /bin/grep: Argument list too long $ echo *.log | xargs grep ERROR /dev/null 20090119.00011.log:DANGEROUS ERROR

exclude a column with cut
Show all columns except 5th. This might help you save some typing if you are trying to exclude some columns from the output.

Get a range of SVN revisions from svn diff and tar gz them
Handy when you need to create a list of files to be updated when subversion is not available on the remote host. You can take this tar file, and upload and extract it where you need it. Replace M and N with the revisions specific to yours. Make sure you do this from an updated (svn up) working directory.

Email an svn dump
Dumps a compressed svn backup to a file, and emails the files along with any messages as the body of the email

Sort and count subjects of emails stuck in Exim queue

Import/clone a Subversion repo to a git repo

Repeat a command until stopped
In this case it runs the command 'curl localhost:3000/site/sha' waiting the amount of time in sleep, ie: 1 second between runs, appending each run to the console. This works well for any command where the output is less than your line width This is unlike watch, because watch always clears the display.


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