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Convert CSV to JSON
Replace 'csv_file.csv' with your filename.

Alternative size (human readable) of files and directories (biggest last)
using mb it's still readable;) a symbol variation $ du -ms {,.[^.]}* | sort -nk1

Skip to next selection in playlist
Uses process signal to play next selection

Alert on high ping to know if it's really laggy while playing
Online games have pretty good lag compensation nowadays, Sometimes though, you really want to get some warning about your latency, e.g. while playing Diablo III in Hardcore mode, so you know when to carefully quit the game b/c your flatmate started downloading all his torrents at once. This is done on Darwin. On Linux/*nix you would need to find another suitable command instead of `say` to spell out your latency. And I used fping because it's a little bit easier to get the latency value needed. Something similar with our regular ping command could look like this: $ while :; do a=$(ping -c1 google.com | grep -o 'time.*' | cut -d\= -f2 | cut -d\ -f1 | cut -b1-4); [[ $a > 40 ]] && say "ping is $a"; sleep 3; done

Convert all .wav to .mp3
Audio convert is a script that uses zenity and lame to transcode virtually any format to any other format provided you have the libraries installed to do so.

Change a specific value in a path
Awk replaces the value of a specific field while retaining the field separator "/" .

Find the package that installed a command

Alias TAIL for automatic smart output
Run the alias command, then issue $ps aux | tail and resize your terminal window (putty/console/hyperterm/xterm/etc) then issue the same command and you'll understand. $ ${LINES:-`tput lines 2>/dev/null||echo -n 12`} Insructs the shell that if LINES is not set or null to use the output from `tput lines` ( ncurses based terminal access ) to get the number of lines in your terminal. But furthermore, in case that doesn't work either, it will default to using the default of 80. The default for TAIL is to output the last 10 lines, this alias changes the default to output the last x lines instead, where x is the number of lines currently displayed on your terminal - 7. The -7 is there so that the top line displayed is the command you ran that used TAIL, ie the prompt. Depending on whether your PS1 and/or PROMPT_COMMAND output more than 1 line (mine is 3) you will want to increase from -2. So with my prompt being the following, I need -7, or - 5 if I only want to display the commandline at the top. ( http://www.askapache.com/linux/bash-power-prompt.html ) 275MB/748MB [7995:7993 - 0:186] 06:26:49 Thu Apr 08 [askapache@n1-backbone5:/dev/pts/0 +1] ~ $ In most shells the LINES variable is created automatically at login and updated when the terminal is resized (28 linux, 23/20 others for SIGWINCH) to contain the number of vertical lines that can fit in your terminal window. Because the alias doesn't hard-code the current LINES but relys on the $LINES variable, this is a dynamic alias that will always work on a tty device.

Restore a local drive from the image on remote host via ssh

Easy and fast access to often executed commands that are very long and complex.
When using reverse-i-search you have to type some part of the command that you want to retrieve. However, if the command is very complex it might be difficult to recall the parts that will uniquely identify this command. Using the above trick it's possible to label your commands and access them easily by pressing ^R and typing the label (should be short and descriptive). UPDATE: One might suggest using aliases. But in that case it would be difficult to change some parts of the command (such as options, file/directory names, etc).


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