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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.

last.fm rss parser
Quick and kludgy rss parser for the recent tracks rss feed from last.fm. Extracts artist and track link.

Get absolut path to your bash-script
Another way of doing it that's a bit clearer. I'm a fan of readable code.

Show recent earthquakes in Bay Area
To see only earthquakes for today, add another pipe to egrep "`date '+%Y/%m/%d'`"

Grep recursively for a pattern and open all files that match, in order, in Vim, landing on 1st match

shush MOTD
I'm annoyed by the boilerplate "don't login unless you are supposed messages in our environment" - this shuts them up.

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"

search for files or directories, then show a sorted list of just the unique directories where the matches occur
Ever use 'locate' to find a common phrase in a filename or directory name? Often you'll get a huge list of matches, many of which are redundant, and typically the results are not sorted. This command will 'locate' your search phrase, then show you a sorted list of just the relevant directories, with no duplications. So, for example, maybe you have installed several versions of the java jre and you want to track down every directory where files matching "java" might exist. Well, a 'locate java' is likely to return a huge list with many repeated directories since many files in one directory could contain the phrase "java". This command will whittle down the results to a minimal list of unique directory names where your search phrase finds a match.

check the status of 'dd' in progress (OS X)
While a dd is running in one terminal, open another and enter the while loop. The sample output will be displayed in the window running the dd and the while loop will exit when the dd is complete. It's possible that a "sudo" will need to be inserted before "pkill", depending on your setup, for example: $ while pgrep ^dd; do sudo pkill -INFO dd; sleep 10; done

Stream system sounds over rtmp
sox (SOund eXchange) can capture the system audio be it a browser playing youtube or from hardware mic and can pipe it to ffmpeg which encodes it into flv and send it over rtmp. Tested using Red5 rtmp server.


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