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Force an fsck on reboot
Force an fsck on reboot. Useful on a system where / has mounted read-only because of file system issues.

Paged, colored svn diff
I put this in a shell script called "svndiff", as it provides a handy decorated "svn diff" output that is colored (which you can't see here) and paged. The -r is required so less doesn't mangle the color codes.

list files recursively by size

Output Detailed Process Tree for any User
An easy function to get a process tree listing (very detailed) for all the processes of any gived user. This function is also in my http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

Parse m3u playlist file for total time
Parse an m3u file with seconds for each item and output the length of the entire playlist

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" }

Vectorize xkcd strips
Uses ImageMagick and potrace to vectorize the input image, with parameters optimized for xkcd-like pictures.

Find the files that contain a certain term
Simple use of find and grep to recursively search a directory for files that contain a certain term.

change dinosaur poop into gold
if firefox is running the database is locked, so you need to copy the places.sqlite file temporarily somewhere to be able to query it...

find all writable (by user) files in a directory tree (use 4 for readable, 1 for executable)


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