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Make a file not writable / immutable by root
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/11/make-your-files-immutable-which-even.html

show the date every rpm was installed
the newest rpms are at the top; individual packages can also be queried this way: rpm --last -q package

List users with running processes
This is different that `who` in that who only cares about logged-in users running shells, this command will show all daemon users and what not; also users logged in remotely via SSH but are running SFTP/SCP only and not a shell.

Random file naming

climagic's New Year's Countdown clock
This is the 140 character long new year's countdown timer that was posted to the climagic account on twitter and identi.ca. There are saner ways of doing this of course, but probably none of those would fit. Uses the figlet command, but of course you can replace figlet with just echo if you want.

Throttling Bandwidth On A Mac
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 50KByte/s Set the bandwidth (bw) limit to any number you want. For example you could have a 15kb pipe for X application and then a 100kb pipe for another application and attach things to those pipes. If a port isn’t attached to a pipe, it runs at full speed. Change the number (in this case 1) to a different number for a different pipe. The next step is to attach your port. sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80 In this case anything on port 80 (http) will be set to a limit of 50Kbyte/s. If you want to attach a second port to this pipe, repeat the command but change the port number at the end. src : http://www.mactricksandtips.com/2008/12/throttling-bandwidth-on-a-mac.html

Check your unread Gmail from the command line
Just an alternative with more advanced formating for readability purpose. It now uses colors (too much for me but it's a kind of proof-of-concept), and adjust columns.

dd with progress bar and statistics
This command utilizes 'pv' to show dd's progress. Notes on use with dd: -- dd block size (bs=...) is a widely debated command-line switch and should usually be between 1024 and 4096. You won't see much performance improvements beyond 4096, but regardless of the block size, dd will transfer every bit of data. -- pv's switch, '-s' should be as close to the size of the data source as possible. -- dd's out file, 'of=...' can be anything as the data within that file are the same regardless of the filename / extension.

convert filenames in current directory to lowercase
The simplest way I know.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.


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