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Merges given files line by line
In the above example all files have 4 lines. In "file1" consecutive lines are: "num, 1, 2, 3", in "file2": "name, Jack, Jim, Frank" and in "file3": "scores, 1300, 1100, 980". This one liner can save considerate ammount of time when you're trying to process serious portions of data. "-d" option allows one to set series of characters to be used as separators between data originating from given files.

Change host name
With sed you can replace strings on the fly.

Get a metascore from metacritic.com
This will fetch a metascore from metacritic.com. It requires a url from metacritic without the http://www.metacritic.com/ Example: $ metascore games/platforms/wii/supermariogalaxy - $ metascore tv/shows/marriageref - $ metascore video/titles/newmoon Would be cool to use this in some sort of a graph.

Display the size of all your home's directories
Display the size (human reading) of all the directories in your home path (~).

bash: display disks by id, UUID and HW path
Shows a tree of the disks. Requires "tree"

Quick directory bookmarks
Set a bookmark as normal shell variable $ p=/cumbersome/path/to/project To go there $ to p This saves one "$" and is faster to type ;-) The variable is still useful as such: $ vim $p/ will expand the variable (at least in bash) and show a list of files to edit. If setting the bookmarks is too much typing you could add another function $ bm() { eval $1=$(pwd); } then bookmark the current directory with $ bm p

Pimp your less
# s = combine multiple lines of whitespace into 1 # x4 = set the tabstop to 4 instead of 8 # F = Exit if the output fits on 1 screen. This is similar to git diff # R = Raw control chars. This allows you to pipe colordiff straight to less. ie: alias sdi="svn diff | colordiff | less" # S = Chop off long lines # X = Dont send termcap init and deinit scrings to the terminal

Throttling Bandwidth On A Mac
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 50KByte/s Set the bandwidth (bw) limit to any number you want. For example you could have a 15kb pipe for X application and then a 100kb pipe for another application and attach things to those pipes. If a port isn’t attached to a pipe, it runs at full speed. Change the number (in this case 1) to a different number for a different pipe. The next step is to attach your port. sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80 In this case anything on port 80 (http) will be set to a limit of 50Kbyte/s. If you want to attach a second port to this pipe, repeat the command but change the port number at the end. src : http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/12/throttling-bandwidth-on-a-mac.html

"I Feel Lucky" for Google Images
prompts for a search term and then pulls down the first result from google images

Show drive names next to their full serial number (and disk info)
As of this writing, this requires a fairly recent version of util-linux, but is much simpler than the previous alternatives. Basically, lsblk gives a nice, human readable interface to all the blkid stuff. (Of course, I wouldn't recommend this if you're going to be parsing the output.) This command takes all the fun out of the previous nifty pipelines, but I felt I ought to at least mention it as an alternative since it is the most practical.


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