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Unaccent an entire directory tree with files.
This command changes all filename and directories within a directory tree to unaccented ones. I had to do this to 'sanitize' some samba-exported trees. The reason it works might seem a little difficult to see at first - it first reverses-sort by pathname length, then it renames only the basename of the path. This way it'll always go in the right order to rename everything. Some notes: 1. You'll have to have the 'unaccent' command. On Ubuntu, just aptitude install unaccent. 2. In this case, the encoding of the tree was UTF-8 - but you might be using another one, just adjust the command to your encoding. 3. The program might spit a few harmless errors saying the files are the same - not to fear.

Combines an arbitrary number of transparent png files into one file
This one liner; combines all sequentially numbered files; in this example IMG_0001.png to IMG_1121.png by generating the shell script, making the shell script executable and then running the shell script to combine the 1121 png into a single png file named _final.png tested on Mac OS X 10.6.3 with ImageMagick 6.5.8-0 2009-11-22 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org

Find last modified files in a directory and its subdirectories
Goes through all files in the directory specified, uses `stat` to print out last modification time, then sorts numerically in reverse, then uses cut to remove the modified epoch timestamp and finally head to only output the last 10 modified files. Note that on a Mac `stat` won't work like this, you'll need to use either: $ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 stat -f '%m%t%Sm %12z %N' | sort -nr | cut -f2- | head or alternatively do a `brew install coreutils` and then replace `stat` with `gstat` in the original command.

Extract a remote tarball in the current directory without having to save it locally

Updating to Fedora 11

send kernel log (dmesg) notifications to root via cron
this is helpful because dmesg is where i/o errors, etc are logged to... you will also be able to see when the system reboots or someone attaches a thumb drive, etc. don't forget to set yourself up in /etc/aliases to get roots email.

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" }

Verbosely delete files matching specific name pattern, older than 15 days.

Compare prices in euro of the HTC Desire on all the european websites of Expansys.
You think Expansys in all these countries will sell the HTC Desire for the same price? Well, you'll be surprised. Most of them will be sold at 499.99 EUR but the cheapest can be found in Germany and the most expensive, in Belgium.

Print every Nth line (to a maximum)
Thanks to knoppix5 for the idea :-) Print selected lines from a file or the output of a command. Usage: $ every NTH MAX [FILE] Print every NTH line (from the first MAX lines) of FILE. If FILE is omitted, stdin is used. The command simply passes the input to a sed script: $ sed -n -e "${2}q" -e "0~${1}p" ${3:-/dev/stdin} print no output $ sed -n quit after this many lines (controlled by the second parameter) $ -e "${2}q" print every NTH line (controlled by the first parameter) $ -e "0~${1}p" take input from $3 (if it exists) otherwise use /dev/stdin ${3:-/dev/stdin}


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