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Aptitude pattern match
Could be dangerous, if you have many packages all beginning with 'foo' or 'bar'. This will easily remove them all from your system.

prevent accidents and test your command with echo
if you're using wildcards * or ? in your command, and if you're deleting, moving multiple files, it's always safe to see how those wildcards will expand. if you put "echo" in front of your command, the expanded form of your command will be printed. It's better safe than sorry.

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Print a row of characters across the terminal
Print a row of characters across the terminal. Uses tput to establish the current terminal width, and generates a line of characters just long enough to cross it. In the example '#' is used. It's possible to use a repeating sequence by dividing the columns by the number of characters in the sequence like this: $ seq -s'~-' 0 $(( $(tput cols) /2 )) | tr -d '[:digit:]' or $ seq -s'-~?' 0 $(( $(tput cols) /3 )) | tr -d '[:digit:]' You will lose chararacters at the end if the length isn't cleanly divisible.

Show a script or config file without comments or blank lines

show where symlinks are pointing
displays the output of ls -l without the rest of the crud. pretty simple but useful.

Remove a range of lines from a file

Kill all Zombie processes if they accept it!
Tested on FreeBSD 8.1 and CSH. The scripts works correctly but the Zombies do not die! I hope it will run and function as expected in Linux and others.

recursive search and replace old with new string, inside files
xargs deals badly with special characters (such as space, ' and "). To see the problem try this: touch important_file touch 'not important_file' ls not* | xargs rm Parallel https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/parallel/ does not have this problem.

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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