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Generate random password on Mac OS X
Feel free to put this in your ~/.profile: $ random(){ cat /dev/urandom | env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc $1 | head -c $2; echo; } Then use it to generate passwords: $ random [:alnum:] 16 Or DNA sequences: $ random ACGT 256

remove repeated pairs of characters e.g. "xtxtxtxt" will become "xt"
This will remove repeated characters e.g. echo "xtxtxtxt" | sed -ru 's/(..)\1{2,}/\1/g' the output will just be "xt"

Zip each file in a directory individually with the original file name
This will list the files in a directory, then zip each one with the original filename individually. video1.wmv -> video1.zip video2.wmv -> video2.zip This was for zipping up large amounts of video files for upload on a Windows machine.

Get the current gold price
Returns the current price of a troy ounce of gold, in USD. Requires the "jq" JSON parser.

Pulse Volume Control Using Zenity
This produces a little bar that you can use to set the volume percentage.

print battery , thermal , and cooling info

Show DeviceMapper names for LVM Volumes (to disambiguate iostat logs, etc)
Emits the device names which will be printed by iostat for an LVM volume; doesn't show the names for the underlying devices when snapshots are being used (the -cow and -real devices in /dev/mapper)

Binary clock

Show a config file without comments
Shows a file without comments (at least those starting by #) - removes empty lines - removes lines starting by # or "some spaces/tabs then #'" Useful when you want to quickly see what you have to customize on a freshly installed application without reading the comments that sometimes are a full 1000 lines documentation :) While posting, I saw this http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/1041/display-contents-of-a-file-wo-any-comments-or-blank-lines But it's dirty and incomplete, to my mind My original goal was to remove lines like "\t*#" but I can't figure out how to do a egrep '\t' on a command-line. Two workarounds if needed: $egrep -v 'press control + V then TAB then #' /your/file or $egrep -v -f some_file /your/file #where some_file contains what you want to exclude, example a really inserted TAB

find duplicate messages in a Maildir
# find assumes email files start with a number 1-9 # sed joins the lines starting with " " to the previous line # gawk print the received and from lines # sort according to the second field (received+from) # uniq print the duplicated filename # a message is viewed as duplicate if it is received at the same time as another message, and from the same person. The command was intended to be run under cron. If run in a terminal, mutt can be used: mutt -e "push otD~=xq" -f $folder


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