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New command with the last argument of the previous command.

run a command from within vi without exiting
":! ls -l " results in listing the files in the current directory. pressing "enter" will get you back into vi.

Remove empty directories
You can also use, $ find . -depth -type d -exec rmdir {} \; 2>/dev/null

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

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

Get last sleep time on a Mac
Similarly for last wake time: $ sysctl -a | grep waketime

Find out my Linux distribution name and version

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Generate random password on Mac OS X
Feel free to put this in your ~/.profile: $ random(){ cat /dev/urandom | env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc $1 | head -c $2; echo; } Then use it to generate passwords: $ random [:alnum:] 16 Or DNA sequences: $ random ACGT 256

exit without saving history
this exits bash without saving the history. unlike explicitly disabling the history in some way, this works anywhere, and it works if you decide *after* issuing the command you don't want logged, that you don't want it logged ... $$ ( or ${$} ) is the pid of the current bash instance this also works perfectly in shells that don't have $$ if you do something like $ kill -9 `readlink /proc/self`


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