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cd to (or operate on) a file across parallel directories
This is useful for quickly jumping around branches in a file system, or operating on a parellel file. This is tested in bash. cd to (substitute in PWD, a for b) where PWD is the bash environmental variable for the "working directory"

save date and time for each command in history
for the change stay in your history file , export command by writing it into your .bashrc

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

Diff two directories by finding and comparing the md5 checksums of their contents.
Compute the md5 checksums for the contents of two mirrored directories, then sort and diff the results. If everything matches, nothing is returned. Otherwise, any checksums which do not match, or which exist in one tree but not the other, are returned. As you might imagine, the output is useful only if no errors are found, because only the checksums, not filenames, are returned. I hope to address this, or that someone else will!

Your name backwards

Show the PATH, one directory per line (part 2)
Here is another way to show the path, one directory per line. The command `tr` translates the colon into the new line, taking input from the $PATH variable

Create the oauth token required for a Twitter stream feed
This is the THIRD in a set of five commands. See my other commands for the previous two. This step creates the oauth 1.0 token as explained in http://oauth.net/core/1.0/ The token is required for a Twitter filtered stream feed (and almost all Twitter API calls) This token is simply an encrypted version of your base string. The encryption key used is your hmac. The last part of the command scans the Base64 token string for '+', '/', and '=' characters and converts them to percentage-hex escape codes. (URI-escapeing). This is also a good example of where the $() syntax of Bash command substitution fails, while the backtick form ` works - the right parenthesis in the case statement causes a syntax error if you try to use the $() syntax here. See my previous two commands step1 and step2 to see how the base string variable $b and hmac variable $hmac are generated.

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" }

Compare / diff two images
Outputs the number of different pixels. 2 params to increase tolerance: * thumbnails size * fuzz, the color distance tolerance See http://en.positon.org/post/Compare-/-diff-between-two-images for more details.

Partition a sequence of disk drives for LVM with fdisk
So, I'm using a CentOS VM in VirtualBox, and created four new disks in the SCSI controller. The VM created the folders: /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd Using a 'for loop' all disks are partitioned for LVM.


Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

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