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Watch the size of a directory using figlet
You can substitute /home/$USER with any path you like.

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

keep a log of the active windows
This logs the titles of the active windows, thus you can monitor what you have done during which times. (it is not hard to also log the executable name, but then it is gets too long)

Make changes in .bashrc immediately available
Simply sourcing .bashrc does not function correctly when you edit it and change an alias for a function or the other way round with the *same name*. I therefor use this function. Prior to re-sourcing .bashrc it unsets all aliases and functions.

Execute a command with a timeout
A timeout is great, but what if the command is taking longer than expected because it's hung up or ran into some other problem? That's where the -k option comes in. Run "some_command" and timeout after 30s. If the command is still running after 1 minute, it will receive a kill signal.

detect the fastest ldap server on a intranet
This command line detect ldap hosts, by mandatory dns entry, then ping them to detect response average. based on ping response average it sorts and print the faster server in first output line

create a nicely formatted example of a shell command and its output
Shell function which takes a bash command as its input, and displays the following formatted output: EXAMPLE: command OUTPUT: output from command

Output a SSL certificate start or end date
A quick and simple way of outputting the start and end date of a certificate, you can simply use 'openssl x509 -in xxxxxx.crt -noout -enddate' to output the end date (ex. notAfter=Feb 01 11:30:32 2009 GMT) and with the date command you format the output to an ISO format. For the start date use the switch -startdate and for end date use -enddate.

Poor man's unsort (randomize lines)

Disable graphical login on Solaris
With a full installation of Solaris 10, the graphical login and desktop will start by default. This command will disable that feature. To enable it again use: /usr/dt/bin/dtconfig -e


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