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Get a list of the erroring cifs entries in fstab
It disturbs me when my logwatch report tells me a share or machine has disappeared, esp as mount isn't telling me what's gone. This command outputs to stderr the erroring cifs entries from fstab.

Count opening and closing braces in a string.
This function counts the opening and closing braces in a string. This is useful if you have eg long boolean expressions with many braces and you simply want to check if you didn't forget to close one.

repeat a command every one second
Short method of "while x=0; do foo ; sleep 1 ; done"

Find the package that installed a command

Remove a line in a text file. Useful to fix "ssh host key change" warnings

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"

Simple way to envoke a secure vnc session through ssh enabled router.
The ip address is of the remote machine running the vncserver. Must log in first to the router then the VNC session. Very nice if you have open-wrt or dd-wrt on your router.

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" }

convert mp3 into mb4 (audiobook format)
to convert a whole directory, put all mp3 files in a for loop $ for i in $(ls *mp3); do mpg123 -s $i | faac -b 80 -P -X -w -o ${i%mp3}m4b -; done

recursively change file name from uppercase to lowercase (or viceversa)
or, to process a single directory: $ for f in *; do mv $f `echo $f |tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; done


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