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Fibonacci With Case
Returns the '$1'th Fibonacci number.

Realtime lines per second in a log file, with history
This is similar to standard `pv`, but it retains the rate history instead of only showing the current rate. This is useful for spotting changes. To do this, -f is used to force pv to output, and stderr is redirected to stdout so that `tr` can swap the carriage returns for new lines. (doesn't work correctly is in zsh for some reason. Tail's output isn't redirected to /dev/null like it is in bash. anyone know why? ???????)

Get gzip compressed web page using wget.
Get gzip compressed web page using wget. Caution: The command will fail in case website doesn't return gzip encoded content, though most of thw websites have gzip support now a days.

add files to existing growable DVD using growisofs
replace "directory name with files to add to DVD" with actual directory containing files you want to add to growable DVD

Find out how old a web page is
I used to use the Firefox "View page info" feature a lot to determine how stale the web page I was looking at was. Now that I use mostly Chrome I miss that feature, so here is a command line alternative using wget. The -S says to display the server response, the --spider says to not download any files/pages, just fetch the header. The output goes to stderr, so to grep it you use 2>&1 to combine the stderr stream with stdout, the pipe that to grep for Last-Modified. You can use curl instead if you have it installed, like this: $ curl --head -s http://osswin.sourceforge.net | grep Mod

How many days until the end of the year

Get table column names from an MySQL-database in comma-seperated form

Create an alias, store it in ~/.bash_aliases and source your new alias into the ~/.bashrc
This is useful if you use a shell with a lot of other users. You will be able to run "topu" to see your running processes instead of the complete 'top -u username'. Read more on alias: http://man.cx/alias

Rename files in batch

Function that outputs dots every second until command completes
Very useful in shell scripts because you can run a task nicely in the background using job-control and output progress until it completes. Here's an example of how I use it in backup scripts to run gpg in the background to encrypt an archive file (which I create in this same way). $! is the process ID of the last run command, which is saved here as the variable PI, then sleeper is called with the process id of the gpg task (PI), and sleeper is also specified to output : instead of the default . every 3 seconds instead of the default 1. So a shorter version would be sleeper $!; The wait is also used here, though it may not be needed on your system. $ echo ">>> ENCRYPTING SQL BACKUP" $ gpg --output archive.tgz.asc --encrypt archive.tgz 1>/dev/null & $ PI=$!; sleeper $PI ":" 3; wait $PI && rm archive.tgz &>/dev/null Previously to get around the $! not always being available, I would instead check for the existance of the process ID by checking if the directory /proc/$PID existed, but not everyone uses proc anymore. That version is currently the one at http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html but I plan on upgrading to this new version soon.


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