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Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there
Sometimes in a script you want to make sure that a directory is in the path, and add it in if it's not already there. In this example, $dir contains the new directory you want to add to the path if it's not already present. There are multiple ways to do this, but this one is a nice clean shell-internal approach. I based it on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1397020. You can also do it using tr to separate the path into lines and grep -x to look for exact matches, like this: $ if ! $(echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://stackoverflow.com/a/5048977. Or replace the "echo | tr" part with a shell parameter expansion, like $ if ! $(echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi which I got from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3209/. There are also other more regex-y ways to do it, but I find the ones listed here easiest to follow. Note some of this is specific to the bash shell.

search installed files of package, that doesn't remember his name well. On rpm systems
rpm, sometimes, is not wildcard friendly. To search files installed from package this could be useful. change PACKAGENAME to any package do you want to search

Remove last line from files recursively
Used this command recently to remove the trailing ?> from all the files in a php project, which has having some unnecessary whitespace issues. Obviously, change *.php to whatever you'd like.

Use tee to process a pipe with two or more processes
Tee can be used to split a pipe into multiple streams for one or more process to work it. You can add more " >()" for even more fun.

Shortcut to find files with ease.
It looks for files that contains the given word as parameter. * case insensitive * matches files containing the given word.

Post a message to another users screen via SSH
Post a message on another users screen via SSH

find and grep Word docs
Find Word docs by filename in the current directory, convert each of them to plain text using antiword (taking care of spaces in filenames), then grep for a search term in the particular file. (Of course, it's better to save your data as plain text to make for easier grepping, but that's not always possible.) Requires antiword. Or you can modify it to use catdoc instead.

move you up one directory quickly
Alias a single character 'b' to move to parent directory. Put it into your .bashrc or .profile file. Using "cd .." is one of the most repetitive sequence of characters you'll in the command line. Bring it down to two keys 'b' and 'enter'. It stands for "back" Also useful to have multiple: alias b='cd ../' alias bb='cd ../../' alias bbb='cd ../../../' alias bbbb='cd ../../../../'

Get Futurama quotations from slashdot.org servers
slashdot.org webserver adds an X-Bender or X-Fry HTTP header to every response!


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