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online MAC address lookup

On Screen micro display for battery and CPU temperature. nifty, small, omnipresent
My firefox overheats my cpu, sometimes above 90 degrees Celsius ( hence the name? ) To keep an eye on temperature, I put this command inside KAlarm ( a kind of cron) to be repeated every minute, for 5 seconds, color red ( default for osd_cat). Its pretty, ultra small, displays a micro 2 lines text on every desktop and over everything and do not steal focus or interrupt any task. I get the information passively, in the low profile bottom of the screen. Of course you can use it inside a terminal. Just do it: watch -n 60 'acpi -t | osd_cat -p bottom'

Delete all empty lines from a file with vim
This command delete all the empty lines (include the lines with space) from a file. g = global command \S = non-whitespace character; !\S the opposite d = delete a range

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

save man-page as pdf

Create and play an instant keyword based playlist
It works best as part of a function, such as the following: MUSICROOT=~/Music function fplay { if [ $1 = '-v' ]; then shift 1 find -E $MUSICROOT -type f -iname "*$**" -iregex '.*\.(3g[2|p]|aac|ac3|adts|aif[c|f]?|amr|and|au|caf|m4[a|r|v]|mp[1-4|a]|mpeg[0,9]?|sd2|wav)' -print -exec afplay "{}" \; & else find -E $MUSICROOT -type f -iname "*$**" -iregex '.*\.(3g[2|p]|aac|ac3|adts|aif[c|f]?|amr|and|au|caf|m4[a|r|v]|mp[1-4|a]|mpeg[0,9]?|sd2|wav)' -exec afplay "{}" \; & fi }

Use a var with more text only if it exists
See "Parameter Expansion" in the bash manpage. They refer to this as "Use Alternate Value", but we're including the var in the at alternative.

get partitions that are over 50% usage

Binary clock
Fun idea! This one adds seconds and keeps running on the same line. Perl's probably cheating though. :)

directly ssh to host B that is only accessible through host A
Of course you need to be able to access host A for this ;-)


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