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Print a date from 3 days ago
This command prints the Date (Not time) from 3 days ago (72 hours ago). This works on systems without GNU date (MacOSX , Solaris, FreeBSD).

random xkcd comic
i sorta stole this from http://www.shell-fu.org/lister.php?id=878#MTC_form but it didn't work, so here it is, fixed. --- updated to work with jpegs, and to use a fancy positive look behind assertion.

Silently deletes lines containing a specific string in a bunch of files
This command will find all occurrences of one or more patterns in a collection of files and will delete every line matching the patterns in every file

Find corrupted jpeg image files
Finds all corrupted jpeg files in current directory and its subdirectories. Displays the error or warning found. The jpeginfo is part of the jpeginfo package in debian. Should you wish to only get corrupted filenames, use cut to extract them : $ find ./ -name *jpg -exec jpeginfo -c {} \; | grep -E "WARNING|ERROR" | cut -d " " -f 1

Find files changed between dates defined by ctime of two files specified by name
This command finds all the files whose status has changed between the ctime of the older and newer . Very useful if you can see from an ls listing a block of consecutive files you want to move or delete, but can't figure out exactly the time range by date.

list files recursively by size

notify yourself when a long-running command which has ALREADY STARTED is finished
If you want to be notified when a long-running command is finished, but you have already started it: CTRL+Z $ fg; echo "finished" | sendmail me@example.com I use a script to post a tweet, which sends me a txt: $ fg; echo "finished" | tweet

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

Pack up some files into a tarball on a remote server without writing to the local filesystem
I recently found myself with a filesystem I couldn't write to and a bunch of files I had to get the hell out of dodge, preferably not one at a time. This command makes it possible to pack a bunch of files into a single archive and write it to a remote server.

Copy a file using pv and watch its progress
pv allows a user to see the progress of data through a pipeline, by giving information such as time elapsed, percentage completed (with progress bar), current throughput rate, total data transferred, and ETA. (man pv)


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