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output absolute path of the present working directory
I've seen a lot of overly complicated attempts at figuring out "where am I?" I think this is a part of the problem: type -a pwd force the use of the binary version of `pwd` instead of the built-in with "/bin/pwd -P" -P option provides an absolute path to the present working directory for the overly cautious type: $(which pwd) -P

Complex string encoding with sed
Pipe | avoid escaping occurences problems in using sed and make it easier to use

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" }

full path listing in /directory/path/* of javascript files.
file listing in /directory/path/* of specific files such as javascript(js) .

scan multiple log subdirectories for the latest log files and tail them

cycle through everything sox knows how to read, playing only the first three seconds
I wasted two hours reading the sox documentation and searching on the web for the format of some obscure fscking sound sample, and then finally came up with this. This plays only the first three seconds of your unknown formatted sound file using every one of sox's built-in filetypes. If you don't get an exact match, you may get close. . I could not fit every single type in and keep it under 127 characters, so you will have to replace "..." with the full list obtainable by `$ sox --help` (or try `Show sample output`) . note: /usr/bin/play should be linked to sox on most systems.

Find usb device in realtime
Using this command you can track a moment when usb device was attached.

Changing the terminal title to the last shell command
You can set the previous bash command as the terminal title by this command. Explanation: -trap assigns a command to execute at a given bash signal. -in the $BASH_COMMAND you find the last command -you can set the terminal title with the escape sequence: \e]0;this is the title\007 -to let the echo care about the backslashes give the -e to it Since trap is a built in bash command you find more informatin in 'man bash'for more Source: http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xterm-titles-with-bash.html

SMTP Analysis
This works just as well for SMTP. You could run this on your mail server to watch e-mail senders and recipients: tcpdump -l -s0 -w - tcp dst port 25 | strings | grep -i 'MAIL FROM\|RCPT TO'

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