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Audible warning when a downloading is finished
This command can be set as an alias in ~/.bashrc For example (in my case) I have : alias watchDl='while [ "$(ls $filePart)" != "" ]; do sleep 5; done; mpg123 /home/.../warning.mp3" ' Then I just need to - initialize filePart (e.g. filePart="*bigFile*rar.part") - launch watchDl

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 - upgrades the specified formulas $ brew outdated - lists outdated installations Note updating all packages may take an excruciatingly long time. You might consider a discriminating approach: run `brew outdated` and select specific packages needing an upgrade.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

random git-commit message
Do a git commit using a random message.

add all files not under version control to repository
This should handle whitespaces well and will not get confused if your filenames have "?" in them

Copy a directory recursively without data/files

Create a mirror of a local folder, on a remote server
Create a exact mirror of the local folder "/root/files", on remote server 'remote_server' using SSH command (listening on port 22) (all files & folders on destination server/folder will be deleted)

find text in a file
this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

Check if it's your binary birthday!
Print out your age in days in binary. Today's my binary birthday, I'm 2^14 days old :-) . This command does bash arithmatic $(( )) on two dates: Today: $(date +%s) Date of birth: $(date +%s -d YYYY-MM-DD) The dates are expressed as the number of seconds since the Unix epoch (Jan 1970), so we devide the difference by 86400 (seconds per day). . Finally we pipe "obase=2; DAYS-OLD" into bc to convert to binary. (obase == output base)

Find distro name and/or version/release
Works for most distributions, tested on Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Gentoo, SUSE, RedHat. Debian and Slackware: $cat /etc/*version

Make alias pemanent fast
Simple function to permanently add an alias to your profile. Tested on bash and Ksh, bash version above. Here is the ksh version: PERMA () { print "$@" >> ~/.profile; } Sample usage: PERMA alias la='ls -a'


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