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Is it a terminal?
Oddly, the isatty(3) glibc C call doesn't have a direct analogue as a command 'isatty(1)'. All is not lost as you can use test(1). For example, your script might be run from a tty or from a GUI menu item but it needs to get user-input or give feedback. Now your script can test STDIN with 'isatty 0' or STDOUT with 'isatty 1' and use xmessage(1) if the tty is not available. The other way to test for this is with 'tty -s' - but that's only for STDIN.

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" }

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" }

Flush and then immediately start watching a file
This is useful for keeping an eye on an error log while developing. The !^ pulls the first arg from the previous command (which needs to be run in a sub-shell for this shortcut to work).

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Pipe STDOUT to vim
The hyphen tells vim to open from STDOUT - saves having to create temporary files.

Recursively remove .svn directories from a local repository

shorten url using curl, sed and is.gd
Just create a function in your .bashrc like this shorturl() { curl -s -d URL="$1" http://is.gd/create.php | sed '/Your new shortened/!d;s/.*value="\([^"]*\)".*/\1/' }

LIst svn commits by user for a date range
Outputs a quick summary of the svn commits for a user over a date range with the detail revision logs including comments and files affected. Useful for searching for a particular change or reporting by user.

draw line separator
Even shorter: $ seq -s '*' 120|tr -d '[0-9]'


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