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repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

Count the number of characters in each line

make, or run a script, everytime a file in a directory is modified
Uses inotifywait from inotify-tools ( http://wiki.github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/ ), that is compatible only with linux. Usefull when you work with files that have to be compiled.. latex, haml, c..

List all open ports and their owning executables
Particularly useful on OS X where netstat doesn't have -p option.

Sets shell timeout
Useful in root's .profile - will auto-logout after TMOUT seconds of inactivity. Close after `seconds` inactive. export TMOUT=seconds (unefunge)

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" }

Kill any lingering ssh processes
Also ignoring "sshd" server is necessary since you should not kill ssh server processes.

Enable cd by variable names
Usage: $ mydir=/very/long/path/to/a/dir $ cd mydir I often need to cd where no man wants to go (i.e. long path). by enabling the shell option cdable_vars, I can tell cd to assume the destination is the name of a variable.

List only directories, one per line

check open ports without netstat or lsof


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