Commands by splante

This is an alternative to #9131. ffmpeg didn't work on my .au files, though it did on the .wav ones. Also useful if you don't have ffmpeg but do have sox. Handily, sox already reports in seconds (decimal).

Shorter, easier to remember version of cmd#7636

NTP is better, but there are situations where it can't be used. In those cases, you can do this to sync the local time to a server.

This is an alternative to another command using two xargs. If it's a command you know there's only one of, you can just use:

This is regarding the command 8263 using an alias to fill in command line options for psql.

You can actually just type 'psql'. In order for that to work, you want to set environment variables PGDATABASE, PGHOST, PGUSER, and (except you're using the default) PGPORT. Also, you can add a line "host:port:dbname:user:password" (asterisk ok in some columns) to your ~/.pgpass file. Finally, if you don't like the aligned columns, you can add the line "\pset format unaligned" to your ~/.psqlrc file.

Admittedly, I'd never have thought of this without the earlier examples, but here's one that you can execute from your workstation to just display the image from another, without separately doing a file transfer, etc. By the way, I hear a loud beep coming from the other room, so I guess it's not too stealthy :-D

The "type" builtin command is handy to find out what executable will be used if you issue a command. But on some distros, particularly when using /etc/alternatives, certain executables get buried under layers and layers of symbolic links and it becomes hard to find which one.

If you put the above command in your .bashrc, it adds a "-c" option to the type command that will weed through the symbolic links and prints the actual file that will be executed.

Credit goes to brun65i but he posted it as a comment instead as an alternative. I hadn't noticed the -h option on sort before and this seems like the cleanest alternative. Thanks Brun65i!

ksh's version of cd has an optional syntax where you can type "cd old new" and it will replace "old" with "new" in your current directory and take you there. This is very handy when you have a parallel directory structure, like source and object directories. As suggested, you can just type cd ${PWD/old/new} to get this in bash, but this function in your .bashrc will let you type the ksh cd syntax and avoid typing the special characters while preserving other cd functionality.