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A DESTRUCTIVE command to render a drive unbootable
Overwrites the boot sector. Since this doesn't overwrite any data, you can usually recover by re-creating the partition table exactly the same as before you zeroed it. This can also help sometimes if you install a new drive in a Windows machine which can't read it.

Archive a directory with datestamp on filename
A useful bash function: gztardir() { if [ $# -ne 1 ] ; then echo "incorrect arguments: should be gztardir " else tar zcvf "${1%/}-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M).tar.gz" "$1" fi }

The Hidden PS
While going through the source code for the well known ps command, I read about some interesting things.. Namely, that there are a bunch of different fields that ps can try and enumerate for you. These are fields I was not able to find in the man pages, documentation, only in the source. Here is a longer function that goes through each of the formats recognized by the ps on your machine, executes it, and then prompts you whether you would like to add it or not. Adding it simply adds it to an array that is then printed when you ctrl-c or at the end of the function run. This lets you save your favorite ones and then see the command to put in your .bash_profile like mine at : http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html Note that I had to do the exec method below in order to pause with read. t () { local r l a P f=/tmp/ps c='command ps wwo pid:6,user:8,vsize:8,comm:20' IFS=' '; trap 'exec 66

echo unicode characters

Synchronise a file from a remote server
You will be prompted for a password unless you have your public keys set-up.

Get current Xorg resolution via xrandr
Not sure if it works the same on any shell.

Play 89.3 @TheCurrent and get system notifications on song changes.
Plays the mp3 stream of The Current as a background job. When you are done run: $ fg %1 then to exit Quite possible with Growl for mac I'd guess, although have not tried. Libnotify needed for notification, stream will still work otherwise

Directory Tree

Create several copies of a file
Copy a file to a range of other files.

Find wich ports you probably want to open in your firewall on a fresh installed machine


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