I like to label my grub boot options with the correct kernel version/build.

After building and installing a new kernel with "make install" I had to edit my grub.conf by hand.

To avoid this, I've decided to write this little command line to:

1. read the version/build part of the filename to which the kernel symlinks point

2. replace the first label lines of grub.conf

grub.conf label lines must be in this format:

Latest [{name}-{version/build}]

Old [{name}-{version/build}]

only the {version/build} part is substituted.

For instance:

title Latest [GNU/Linux-2.6.31-gentoo-r10.201003]

would turn to

title Latest [GNU/Linux-2.6.32-gentoo-r7.201004]"

If you have used bash for any scripting, you've used the date command alot. It's perfect for using as a way to create filename's dynamically within aliases,functions, and commands like below.. This is actually an update to my first alias, since a few commenters (below) had good observations on what was wrong with my first command.

# creating a date-based ssh-key for askapache.github.com

# create a tar+gzip backup of the current directory

I personally find myself having to reference

quite a bit as a result. So this nice alias saves me a lot of time. This is one bdash mofo. Works in sh and bash (posix), but will likely need to be changed for other shells due to the parameter substitution going on.. Just extend the sed command, I prefer sed to pretty much everything anyways.. but it's always preferable to put in the extra effort to go for as much builtin use as you can. Otherwise it's not a top one-liner, it's a lazyboy recliner.

Here's the old version:

This trick from my [ http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html bash_profile ]

This command can be used to extract the title defined in HTML pages

Ever gone to a site that has an MP3 embedded into a pesky flash player, but no download link? Well, this one-liner will yank the names of those tunes straight out of FF's cache in a nice, easy to read list. What you do with them after that is *ahem* no concern of mine. ;)

This command modifies the preferences file of Firefox that is located in .mozilla/firefox/*.default/prefs.js. It edits the file with sed and the -i option. Then it searches the string "browser.startup.homepage", and the string next to it (second string). Finally, it replaces the second string with the new homepage, that is http://sliceoflinux.com in the example.

It doesn't work if you haven't set any homepage.

hb blinks, hc does a reverse color with background.. both very nice.

Run this:

Your welcome ;)

From my bash profile - http://www.askapache.com/linux-unix/bash_profile-functions-advanced-shell.html

The shell has perfectly adequate pattern matching for simple expressions.

For those days when you need to know if something is happening because the day ends in "y".

Removes any whitespace characters at the beginning of a line.

extension to tali713's random fact generator. It takes the output & sends it to notify-osd. Display time is proportional to the lengh of the fact.

Though without infinite time and knowledge of how the site will be designed in the future this may stop working, it still will serve as a simple straight forward starting point.

This uses the observation that the only item marked as strong on the page is the single logical line that includes the italicized fact.

If future revisions of the page show failure, or intermittent failure, one may simply alter the above to read.

The file lastfact, can then be examined whenever the command fails.

use curl and sed to shorten an url via goo.gl

Use color escape sequences and sed to colorize the output of svn stat -u.

Colors: http://www.faqs.org/docs/abs/HTML/colorizing.html

svn stat characters: http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.html#svn.ref.svn.c.status

GNU Extensions for Escapes in Regular Expressions: http://www.gnu.org/software/sed/manual/html_node/Escapes.html

Will edit *.db files in the same directory with todays date. Useful for doing a mass update to domains on a nameserver, adding spf records, etc.

Looks for a string starting with 200 or 201 followed by 7 numbers, and replaces with todays date. This won't overwrite Ip's but i would still do some double checking after running this.

Make sure your server's date is correct, otherwise insert your own serial number.

should usually follow this command.

This one uses dictionary.com

The original was a little bit too complicated for me. This one does not use any variables.

Looks up a word on merriam-webster.com, does a screen scrape for the FIRST audio pronunciation and plays it.

USAGE: Put this one-liner into a shell script (e.g., ~/bin/pronounce) and run it from the command line giving it the word to say:

If the word isn't found in merriam-webster, no audio is played and the script returns an error value. However, M-W is a fairly complete dictionary (better than howjsay.com which won't let you hear how to pronounce naughty words).

ASSUMPTIONS: GNU's sed (which supports -r for extended regular expressions) and Linux's aplay. Aplay can be replaced by any program that can play .WAV files from stdin.

KNOWN BUGS: only the FIRST pronunciation is played, which is problematic if you wanted a particular form (plural, adjectival, etc) of the word. For example, if you run this:

you'll hear a voice saying "onomatopoeia".

Playing the correct form of the word is possible, but doing so might make the screen scraper even more fragile than it already is. (The slightest change to the format of m-w.com could break it).

It is helpful to know the current limits placed on your account, and using this shortcut is a quick way to figuring out which values to change for optimization or security.

Alias is:

Here's the result of this command:

core file size (blocks, -c) 0

data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited

scheduling priority (-e) 0

file size (blocks, -f) unlimited

pending signals (-i) 155648

max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 32

max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited

open files (-n) 8192

pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8

POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200

real-time priority (-r) 0

stack size (kbytes, -s) 10240

cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited

max user processes (-u) unlimited

virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited

file locks (-x) unlimited

You WILL have problems if the files have the same name.

Use cases: consolidate music library and unify photos (especially if your camera separates images by dates).

After running the command and verifying if there was no name issues, you can use

to remove now empty subdirectories.

using find's exec option instead of a for loop and using sed's -i option for inplace replacement. no need to do the file swap.

Use sed to edit in-place a list of files returned by find.

Do a recursive (-r) search with grep for all files where your old mail address is mentioned (-l shows only the file names) and use sed to replace it with your new address. Works with other search/replacement patterns too.