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Ring the system bell after finishing a long script/compile
This will ring the system bell once if your script exits successfully and twice if it fails. So you can go look at something else and it will alert you when done. Don't forget to use 'xset b [vol [pitch [duration]]]' to get the bell to sound the way you want.

Find the modified time (mtime) for a file

Update all packages installed via homebrew
As of March 7, 2012: $ brew update - downloads upgraded formulas $ brew upgrade [FORMULA...] - upgrades the specified formulas $ brew outdated - lists outdated installations Note updating all packages may take an excruciatingly long time. You might consider a discriminating approach: run `brew outdated` and select specific packages needing an upgrade. For more information see homebrew's git repository: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew

Play musical notes from octave of middle C
Are there any creative pieces of music that can be created using beep and the shell? I'd love to hear it!

Size (in bytes) of all RPM packages installed
This command will output the size of all RPM packages and string them together into one enormous addition command which will be calculated by the echo $(( ))

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Countdown Clock
Countdown clock - Counts down from $MIN minutes to zero. I let the date command do the maths. This version doesn't use seq.

Tweak system files without invoking a root shell
only for sudo-style systems. Use this construct instead of I/O re-directors ``>'' or ``>>'' because sudo only elevates the commands and *not* the re-directors. ***warning: remember that the `tee` command will clobber file contents unless it is given the ``-a'' argument Also, for extra security, the "left" command is still run unprivileged.

Convert all .flac from a folder subtree in 192Kb mp3
find . -type f -iname '*.flac' # searches from the current folder recursively for .flac audio files | # the output (a .flac audio files with relative path from ./ ) is piped to while read FILE; do FILENAME="${FILE%.*}"; flac -cd "$FILE" | lame -b 192 - "${FILENAME}.mp3"; done # for each line on the list: # FILE gets the file with .flac extension and relative path # FILENAME gets FILE without the .flac extension # run flac for that FILE with output piped to lame conversion to mp3 using 192Kb bitrate

generate a telephone keypad
seems a useless command ...


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