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Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

escape any command aliases
e.g. if rm is aliased for 'rm -i', you can escape the alias by prepending a backslash: rm [file] # WILL prompt for confirmation per the alias \rm [file] # will NOT prompt for confirmation per the default behavior of the command

Add GPG key easy - oneliner
Replace KEY with GPG key. This command will load GPG key and add it to your system so you can use software from third party repos etc.

Reuse all parameter of the previous command line
!* is all of the arguments to the previous command rather than just the last one. This is useful in many situations. Here's a simple example: $ vi cd /stuff oops! [exit vi, twice] $ !* expands to: cd /stuff

Create patch file for two directories

Convert JSON to YAML (unicode safe)
If you tried the other Python version of Convert JSON to YAML and you end up with lines that has "!!python/unicode", this version of the command is for you.

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" }

Find broken symlinks

Find the package that installed a command

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
Your platform may not have pv by default. If you are using Homebew on OSX, simply 'brew install pv'.


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