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Run a command as root, with a delay
$ sleep 1h ; sudo command or $ sudo sleep 1h ; sudo command won't work, because by the time the delay is up, sudo will want your password again.

Swap a file or dir with quick resotre
This lets you replace a file or directory and quickly revert if something goes wrong. For example, the current version of a website's files are in public_html. Put a new version of the site in public_html~ and execute the command. The names are swapped. If anything goes wrong, execute it again (up arrow or !!).

quickest (i blv) way to get the current program name minus the path (BASH)
Useful in shell scripts when you're trying to get the shell script name without the full path - and easier than awking or cutting. Bash pattern matching and variable manip is fun.

Hostname tab-completion for ssh
This is meant for the bash shell. Put this function in your .profile and you'll be able to use tab-completion for sshing any host which is in your known_hosts file. This assumes that your known_hosts file is located at ~/.ssh/known_hosts. The "complete" command should go on a separate line as such: function autoCompleteHostname() { local hosts=($(awk '{print $1}' ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -d, -f1)); local cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}; COMPREPLY=($(compgen -W '${hosts[@]}' -- $cur )) } complete -F autoCompleteHostname ssh

Give all those pictures the same name format, trailing zeros please for the right order, offset to merge different collections of pictures
When you have different digital cameras, different people, friends and you want to merge all those pictures together, then you get files with same names or files with 3 and 4 digit numbers etc. The result is a mess if you copy it together into one directory. But if you can add an offset to the picture number and set the number of leading zeros in the file name's number then you can manage. OFFS != 0 and LZ the same as the files currently have is not supported. Or left as an exercise, hoho ;) I love NF="${NF/#+(0)/}",it looks like a magic bash spell.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Optimize Xsane PDFs
Xsane produces PDFs that are too large - particularly multipage PDFs. This command compresses them. If you do not use A4, remove the -sPAPERSIZE flag.

Collect a lot of icons from /usr/share/icons (may overwrite some, and complain a bit)
Today I needed to choose an icon for an app. My simpler way: put all of /usr/share/icons in myicons folder and brows'em with nautilus. Then rm -r 'ed the entire dir.

Create user add lines from partial passwd file
Handy if you are installing a new server or recovering an old one and you have a passwd file with the accounts you want to add to the server. If you edit the file so that only the accounts that you want to add are left this line will spit out the correct useradd lines. The uid, gecos and shell will be preserved.

keep a log of the active windows
This logs the titles of the active windows, thus you can monitor what you have done during which times. (it is not hard to also log the executable name, but then it is gets too long)


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