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Create and play an instant keyword based playlist
It works best as part of a function, such as the following: MUSICROOT=~/Music function fplay { if [ $1 = '-v' ]; then shift 1 find -E $MUSICROOT -type f -iname "*$**" -iregex '.*\.(3g[2|p]|aac|ac3|adts|aif[c|f]?|amr|and|au|caf|m4[a|r|v]|mp[1-4|a]|mpeg[0,9]?|sd2|wav)' -print -exec afplay "{}" \; & else find -E $MUSICROOT -type f -iname "*$**" -iregex '.*\.(3g[2|p]|aac|ac3|adts|aif[c|f]?|amr|and|au|caf|m4[a|r|v]|mp[1-4|a]|mpeg[0,9]?|sd2|wav)' -exec afplay "{}" \; & fi }

Wait for file to stop changing
Here's a way to wait for a file (a download, a logfile, etc) to stop changing, then do something. As written it will just return to the prompt, but you could add a "; echo DONE" or whatever at the end. This just compares the full output of "ls" every 10 seconds, and keeps going as long as that output has changed since the last interval. If the file is being appended to, the size will change, and if it's being modified without growing, the timestamp from the "--full-time" option will have changed. The output of just "ls -l" isn't sufficient since by default it doesn't show seconds, just minutes. Waiting for a file to stop changing is not a very elegant or reliable way to measure that some process is finished - if you know the process ID there are much better ways. This method will also give a false positive if the changes to the target file are delayed longer than the sleep interval for any reason (network timeouts, etc). But sometimes the process that is writing the file doesn't exit, rather it continues on doing something else, so this approach can be useful if you understand its limitations.

Count occurrences per minute in a log file
The cut should match the relevant timestamp part of the logfile, the uniq will count the number of occurrences during this time interval.

Delete all git branches except master
Delete all your branches except master (useful after archiving branches)

get the full description of a randomly selected package from the list of installed packages on a debian system
I put this command on my ~/.bashrc in order to learn something new about installed packages on my Debian/Ubuntu system each time I open a new terminal

Check a server is up. If it isn't mail me.
For some reason the 2&>1 does not work for me, but the shorter stdout/stderr redirection >& works perfectly (Ubuntu 10.04).

intersection between two files

Which processes are listening on a specific port (e.g. port 80)
swap out "80" for your port of interest. Can use port number or named ports e.g. "http"

list files recursively by size

[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.


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