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autossh + ssh + screen = super rad perma-sessions
Only useful for really flakey connections (but im stuck with one for now). Though if youre in this situation ive found this to be a good way to run autossh and it does a pretty good job of detecting when the session is down and restarting. Combined with the -t and screen commands this pops you back into your working session lickety split w/ as few headaches as possible. And if autossh is a bit slow at detecting the downed ssh connection, just run this in another tab/terminal window to notify autossh that it should drop it and start over. Basically for when polling is too slow. kill -SIGUSR1 `pgrep autossh`

Remove apps with style: nuke it from orbit
You can't stand programs x, y, and z. Remove all trace of their existence by adding this function to your config. It will remove the cruft, the settings, and such and such. This function doesn't even give a damn about you trying to remove programs that don't exist: it'll just for loop to the next one on your hit list.

Grep by paragraph instead of by line.
This is a command that I find myself using all the time. It works like regular grep, but returns the paragraph containing the search pattern instead of just the line. It operates on files or standard input. $ grepp or $ | grepp

format txt as table not joining empty columns
-n switch keeps empty columns If your distribution does not ship with a recent column version that supports -n you can use this alternative: perl -pe 's/(^|;);/$1 ;/g' file.csv | column -ts\; | less -S Change the delimiter to your liking.

Extract the emoticons regex from a running skype process
Skype has an internal regex which depicts the emoticons it supports. However you cannot simply search the binary file for it. This small 181 character line will do just that, provided skype is running. And of course, only works in linux.

How many files in the current directory ?
A simple "ls" lists files *and* directories. So we need to "find" the files (type 'f') only. As "find" is recursive by default we must restrict it to the current directory by adding a maximum depth of "1". If you should be using the "zsh" then you can use the dot (.) as a globbing qualifier to denote plain files: zsh> ls *(.) | wc -l for more info see the zsh's manual on expansion and substitution - "man zshexpn".

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

[vim] Clear trailing whitespace in file
% acts on every line in the file. \s matches spaces. \+ matches one or more occurrences of what's right behind it. Character '$' matches end-of-line.

pass the output of some command to a new email in the default email client
This depends on 'stripansi' and 'urlencode' commands, which exist on my system as these aliases: $ alias stripansi='perl -ple "s/\033\[(?:\d*(?:;\d+)*)*m//g;"' $ alias urlencode='perl -MURI::Escape -ne "\$/=\"\"; print uri_escape \$_"' The `open` command handles URLs on a Mac. Substitute the equivalent for your system (perhaps gnome-open). I don't use system `mail`, so I have this aliased as `mail` and use it this way: $ git show head | mail

Convert seconds to [DD:][HH:]MM:SS
Converts any number of seconds into days, hours, minutes and seconds. sec2dhms() { declare -i SS="$1" D=$(( SS / 86400 )) H=$(( SS % 86400 / 3600 )) M=$(( SS % 3600 / 60 )) S=$(( SS % 60 )) [ "$D" -gt 0 ] && echo -n "${D}:" [ "$H" -gt 0 ] && printf "%02g:" "$H" printf "%02g:%02g\n" "$M" "$S" }


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