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View advanced Sort options, Quick Reference Help Alias
Once you get into advanced/optimized scripts, functions, or cli usage, you will use the sort command alot. The options are difficult to master/memorize however, and when you use sort commands as much as I do (some examples below), it's useful to have the help available with a simple alias. I love this alias as I never seem to remember all the options for sort, and I use sort like crazy (much better than uniq for example). # Sorts by file permissions $ find . -maxdepth 1 -printf '%.5m %10M %p\n' | sort -k1 -r -g -bS 20% 00761 drwxrw---x ./tmp 00755 drwxr-xr-x . 00701 drwx-----x ./askapache-m 00644 -rw-r--r-- ./.htaccess # Shows uniq history fast $ history 1000 | sed 's/^[0-9 ]*//' | sort -fubdS 50% exec bash -lxv export TERM=putty-256color Taken from my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Have your sound card call out elapsed time.
Useful contexts : You are doing yoga or some other physical training in which you are holding a position. Or you practice the pomodoro productivity technique. Or your girlfriend said "We're leaving in 40 minutes". Design details: sleep executes before espeak to give you a 5 seconds head start. espeak is run in the background so it doesn't mess up the timing.

see the TIME_WAIT and ESTABLISHED nums of the network
see the TIME_WAIT and ESTABLISHED nums of the network

Display which distro is installed
Works on nearly all linux distros

Find all dotfiles and dirs
find makes it easier, filtering . and .. maxdepth could be removed, finding entries recursively. Removing mindepth causes . to appear

convert a,b,c to ('a','b','c') for use in SQL in-clauses

ignore hidden directory in bash completion (e.g. .svn)

Get your outgoing IP address

Runs previous command replacing foo by bar every time that foo appears
Very useful for rerunning a long command changing some arguments globally. As opposed to ^foo^bar, which only replaces the first occurrence of foo, this one changes every occurrence.

Copy files for backup storage
Backup a whole directory copying only updated files.


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