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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" }

send a circular
don't need echo :P

Prepend a text to a file.
Using the sed -i (inline), you can replace the beginning of the first line of a file without redirecting the output to a temporary location.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Get the time from NIST.GOV
The format is JJJJJ YR-MO-DA HH:MM:SS TT L DUT1 msADV UTC(NIST) OTM and is explained more fully here: http://tf.nist.gov/service/acts.htm

Short one line while loop that outputs parameterized content from one file to another

Make alias pemanent fast
Simple function to permanently add an alias to your profile. Tested on bash and Ksh, bash version above. Here is the ksh version: PERMA () { print "$@" >> ~/.profile; } Sample usage: PERMA alias la='ls -a'

Backup with versioning
Apart from an exact copy of your recent contents, also keep all earlier versions of files and folders that were modified or deleted. Inspired by EVACopy http://evacopy.sourceforge.net

Find all videos under current directory
Uses mime-type of files rather than relying on file extensions to find files of a certain type. This can obviously be extended to finding files of any other type as well.. like plain text files, audio, etc.. In reference to displaying the total hours of video (which was earlier posted in command line fu, but relied on the user having to supply all possible video file formats) we can now do better: $ find ./ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 file -iNf - | grep video | cut -d: -f1 | xargs -d'\n' /usr/share/doc/mplayer/examples/midentify | grep ID_LENGTH | awk -F "=" '{sum += $2} END {print sum/60/60; print "hours"}'

convert single digit to double digits
each number in a file name gets expanded to the number of digets provided as arg_1 of the arguments in rjust_file_nums. Put the funciton in the .bashrc file. Be sure to $ source ~/.bashrc so that the function will be accessible from bash.


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