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Find Mac address

seconds since epoch to ISO timestamp
No need to use perl, awk, nor /usr/bin/date -- bash's "printf" builtin will do it.

Find the process you are looking for minus the grepped one
As an alternative to using an additional grep -v grep you can use a simple regular expression in the search pattern (first letter is something out of the single letter list ;-)) to drop the grep command itself.

Source zshrc/bashrc in all open terminals
Put this in your zshrc, source it, then run 'pkill -usr1 zsh' to source it in all open terminals. Also works with bash. More info: http://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/12g76v/how_to_automatically_source_zshrc_in_all_open/

Shell function to create a menu of items which may be inserted into the X paste buffer.
The function will take a comma separated list of items to be 'selected' by xsel -i: $ smenu "First item to paste,Paste me #2,Third menu item" You will then be prompted to choose one of the menu items. After you choose, you will be able to paste the string by clicking the middle mouse button. The menu will keep prompting you to choose menu items until you break out with Control-C.

Find usb device
I often use it to find recently added ou removed device, or using find in /dev, or anything similar. Just run the command, plug the device, and wait to see him and only him

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 only *.doc and *xls files on Windows partition
When using regex - there is no need to use -o and 2nd regex.

Rapidly invoke an editor to write a long, complex, or tricky command
Next time you are using your shell, try typing $ ctrl-x ctrl-e # in emacs mode or $ v # in vi mode The shell will take what you've written on the command line thus far and paste it into the editor specified by $EDITOR. Then you can edit at leisure using all the powerful macros and commands of vi, emacs, nano, or whatever.

Commandline document conversion with Libreoffice
In this example, the docx gets converted to Open Document .odt format. For other formats, you'll need to specify the correct filter (Hint: see "Comments" link below for a nice list).


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