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Set name of windows in tmux/byobu to hostnames of servers you're connected to
*I run this with byobu as as a custom status bar entry that runs every 10 seconds by putting it in a script here: $ .byobu/bin/10_update_windows There's no output to stdout, so nothing is displayed on the status bar. *Presumes that #{pane_title} is set to the hostname or prompt containing the host name. In my case, it's in this format: $ $USER@$HOSTNAME:$PWD The sed commands may need to be modified if your pane_title is different. *If you want to strip out a common part of a hostname, add the following before '| uniq' $ -e 's/[COMMON PART]//' I use that to strip out the domain of the servers I connect to, leaving the subdomain.

Vlc ncurses mode browsing local directorys.

Find last reboot time
Specific to OSX.

Connect to google talk through ssh by setting your IM client to use the localhost 5432 port
If your firewall or proxy at your location prevents connection to a particular host or port, you can use ssh to tunnel to your home server and do it there instead.

Number of CPU's in a system
This appears to do the same. Utility is verified to be present on Ubuntu and OpenSuse out-of-the-box.

Get your external IP address
Yeah I know it's been up here a million times, but this service is a really clean and nice one. Nothing but your IP address on it. Actually I was to write something like this, and noticed this on appspot... ;)

List bash functions defined in .bash_profile or .bashrc

pngcrush all .png files in the directory
Find all pngs in directory structure and pngcrush them, none destructive. You can just remove the "{}.crush" part if you want destructive.

beep when a server goes offline
pings a server once per second, and beeps when the server is unreachable. Basically the opposite of: $ ping -a server-or-ip.com which would beep when a server IS reachable. You could also substitute beep with any command, which makes this a powerful alternative to ping -a: $ while true; do [ "$(ping -c1W1w1 server-or-ip.com 2>/dev/null | awk '/received/ {print $4}')" = 1 ] && date || echo 'server is down!'; sleep 1; done which would output the date and time every sec until the ping failed, in which case it would echo. Notes: Requires beep package. May need to run as root (beep uses the system speaker) Tested on Ubuntu which doesn't have beep out of the box... $ sudo apt-get install beep

Search for a process by name
ps and grep is a dangerous combination -- grep tries to match everything on each line (thus the all too common: grep -v grep hack). ps -C doesn't use grep, it uses the process table for an exact match. Thus, you'll get an accurate list with: ps -fC sh rather finding every process with sh somewhere on the line.


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