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get bofh excuse from a trusted source :-)

Averaging columns of numbers
This example calculates the averages of column one and column two of "file.dat". It can be easily modified if other columns are to be averaged.

Set GIT_COMMITTER_DATE = GIT_AUTHOR_DATE for all the git commits

Create cheap and easy index.html file
If your admin has disabled Apache's directory index feature but you want to have a cheap way to enable it for one folder, this command will just create an index.html file with a link to each file in the directory (including the index.html file, which is not ideal but makes the command much simpler). The HTML isn't even remotely compliant, but it could easily be improved on. Also, the command needs to be run each time a file is added or removed to update the index.html file.

Exclude grep from your grepped output of ps (alias included in description)
Surround the first letter of what you are grepping with square brackets and you won't have to spawn a second instance of grep -v. You could also use an alias like this (albeit with sed): alias psgrep='ps aux | grep $(echo $1 | sed "s/^\(.\)/[\1]/g")'

Runs previous command replacing foo by bar every time that foo appears
Very useful for rerunning a long command changing some arguments globally. As opposed to ^foo^bar, which only replaces the first occurrence of foo, this one changes every occurrence.

Gzip files older than 10 days matching *
Useful for a cron job that runs nightly, gzipping or alternatively deleting files from a specific directory that are older than 10 days (in this case)

Add SVN keywords property to all PHP and Javascript files

Recursively scan directories for mp3s and pass them to mplayer
The command first deletes any old playlist calles playlist.tmp under /tmp. After that it recursively searches all direcotries under ~/mp3 and stores the result in /tmp/playlist.tmp. After havin created the playlist, the command will execute mplayer which will shuffle through the playlist. This command is aliased to m is aliased to `rm -rf /tmp/playlist.tmp && find ~/mp3 -name *.mp3 > /tmp/playlist.tmp && mplayer -playlist /tmp/playlist.tmp -shuffle -loop 0 | grep Playing' in my ~/.bashrc.

Find the package that installed a command


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