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Backup with versioning

create pdf files from text files or stdout.

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" }

Securely destroy data (including whole hard disks)
GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards. You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun. Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)

Easily find latex package documentation
If the pdf/dvi/etc documentation for a latex package is already part of your local texmf tree, then texdoc will find and display it for you. If the documentation is not available on your system, it will bring up the package's webpage at CTAN to help you investigate.

Random quote from Borat
I improved a bit on the original by only using sed and extracting the quote with a matching group. Use -nE for sed on Mac OSX Use -nr for sed on Linux. Warning! The quotes from Borat are definitely offensive.

Watch the progress of 'dd'
need pv (pipe view) : http://www.ivarch.com/programs/pv.shtml

Purge configuration files of removed packages on debian based systems

dd with progress bar and statistics to gzipped image

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.


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