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Colorizes an access log
Puts a splash of color in your access logs. IP addresses are gray, 200 and 304 are green, all 4xx errors are red. Works well with e.g. "colorize access_log | less -R" if you want to see your colors while paging. Use as inspiration for other things you might be tailing, like syslog or vmstat Usage: $ tail -f access.log | colorize

Zip a directory on Mac OS X and ignore .DS_Store (metadata) directory
If you want to generate a cross-platform compatible zip file and ignore the Finder's hidden metadata directory

Recursively compare two directories and output their differences on a readable format

extract element of xml
poor man's xml parser :)

Define words and phrases with google.
This function takes a word or a phrase as arguments and then fetches definitions using Google's "define" syntax. The "nl" and perl portion isn't strictly necessary. It just makes the output a bit more readable, but this also works: $define(){ local y="$@";curl -sA"Opera" "http://www.google.com/search?q=define:${y// /+}"|grep -Po '(?/dev/null;}

Benchmark SQL Query
Benchmark a SQL query against MySQL Server. The example runs the query 10 times, and you get the average runtime in the output. To ensure that the query does not get cached, use `RESET QUERY CACHE;` on top in the query file.

Ask for a password, the passwd-style
You can ask repeatedly for a non-blank password using this function: function read_password() { while [ ! -n "$USER_PASSWORD" ]; do read -s -p"Password: " USER_PASSWORD if [ ! -n "$USER_PASSWORD" ]; then echo "ERROR: You must specify a valid password, please try again" fi echo done } Also you can set a time out (in seconds) to write the password read -t 10 -s -p"Password: " USER_PASSWORD_VARIABLE if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "Time out!" fi

format txt as table

Synthesize text as speech
The Festival Speech Synthesis System converts text into sound. Or: links -dump http://youfavoritewebsite.com | festival --tts


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