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Aptitude pattern match
Could be dangerous, if you have many packages all beginning with 'foo' or 'bar'. This will easily remove them all from your system.

Detach a process from the current shell
Continue to execute the command in background even though quitting the shell.

Don't save commands in bash history (only for current session)
Only from a remote machine: Only access to the server will be logged, but not the command. The same way, you can run any command without loggin it to history. ssh user@localhost will be registered in the history as well, and it's not usable.

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" }

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Scrape commands from commandline fu's 1st page
just bored here at work ... if your are daring ... add '| bash' .... enjoy require 'ruby'

infile search and replace on N files (including backup of the files)
the addition of ".bk" to the regular "pie" idiom makes perl create a backup of every file with the extension ".bk", in case it b0rks something and you want it back

ignore .DS_Store forever in GIT
With a couple of little commands, you?ll be able to ignore the .DS_Store files forever from your git repositories on mac! The following command will add the .gitignore file to the git configuration git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore then, the following, will add the .DS_Store to the list echo .DS_Store >> ~/.gitignore

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

PDF simplex to duplex merge
Joins two pdf documents coming from a simplex document feed scanner. Needs pdftk >1.44 w/ shuffle.


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