pinfo package provide a nice info alternative based on ncurses.

Works on CentOS ad OpenBSD too, display time of accounts connection on a system, -p option print individual user's statistics.

You can use this in a script which rotates wallpapers from a directory at each login.

Do you have an entire album in a unique file and want to split it in individual tracks? If you also have the cue file you can do it!

Packages for Debian-based systems users:

* cuetools shntool

* FLAC (.flac): flac

* WavPack (.wv): wavpack

* Monkey's Audio (.ape): libmac2 monkeys-audio (deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org sid main)

NOTE: "sid" packages are unstable, but I didn't have problems with them. If you prefer, use the "stable" version repository.

To transfer the tags, you can use this (works with .flac, .ogg and .mp3):

The title is optional.

Options:

-t: expire time in milliseconds.

-u: urgency (low, normal, critical).

-i: icon path.

On Debian-based systems you may need to install the 'libnotify-bin' package.

Useful to advise when a wget download or a simulation ends. Example:

txt2regex can be interactive or noninteractive and generates regular expressions for a variety of dialects based on user input. In interactive mode, the regex string builds as you select menu options. The sample output here is from noninteractive mode, try running it standalone and see for yourself. It's written in bash and is available as the 'txt2regex' package at least under debian/ubuntu.

You've opened a terminal window and you've connected off to a remote host that didn't pick up your terminal size, and all your curses and paging apps are screwed up as a result. You need to quickly determine how many lines are in your current terminal view (to feed into "stty rows X").

Useful for switching over someone else's coding style who uses camelCase notation to your style using all lowercase with underscores.

Clone linux installation.

Copy every file from current directory to destination preserving modification time.

From screen's manpage: "Attach here and now. In detail this means: If a session is running, then reattach. If necessary detach and logout remotely first. If it was not running create it and notify the user. This is the author's favorite."

Toss this in your ~/.bash_profile so that you never have that "oh crap" moment where you wanted to run something in screen and didn't.

GNU shred is provided by the coreutils package on most Linux distribution (meaning, you probably have it installed already), and is capable of wiping a device to DoD standards.

You can give shred any file to destroy, be it your shell history or a block device file (/dev/hdX, for IDE hard drive X, for example). Shred will overwrite the target 25 times by default, but 3 is enough to prevent most recovery, and 7 passes is enough for the US Department of Defense. Use the -n flag to specify the number of passes, and man shred for even more secure erasing fun.

Note that shredding your shell history may not be terribly effective on devices with journaling filesystems, RAID copies or snapshot copies, but if you're wiping a single disk, none of that is a concern. Also, it takes quite a while :)

Installing most OSX apps is just a matter of dropping it in /Applications, either GUI-wise or with cp -r. However, many packages are distributed in "mpkg" format, and those have to be installed with an installer. If you don't want to go to the trouble of firing up VNC to install an mpkg, you can use the "installer" command.

This will install an application from a .mpkg it to /Applications system-wide. To install a program for just one user, replace "-target /" with "-target username".

To unmount, replace "attach" with "eject"

This will, for an application that has already been removed but had its configuration left behind, purge that configuration from the system. To test it out first, you can remove the last -y, and it will show you what it will purge without actually doing it. I mean it never hurts to check first, "just in case." ;)

So you keep getting buzzes sounding from pidgin but you can't remember which buddy pounce is causing the beep. Well, cat/edit the ~/.purple/pounces and find out!

A powerfull way to rename file using sed groups.

& stand for the matched expression.

\1 referes to the first group between parenthesis. \2 to the second.

Start screen in detached mode, i.e., already running on background. The command is optional, but what is the purpose on start a blank screen process that way?

It's useful when invoking from a script (I manage to run many wget downloads in parallel, for example).

Sometimes Firefox crashes or is bad finished and the message the process is still running appear while it's not. This also works when you sharing account from a NIS server and try to open the browser on multiple computers.