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Recursive find and replace file extension / suffix (mass rename files)
Find recursively all files in ~/Notes with the extension '.md' and pipe that via xargs to rename command, which will replace every '.md' to '.txt' in this example (existing files will not be overwritten).

find file/dir by excluding some unwanted dirs and filesystems
Consider using this cmd when: 1. You are planning to traverse a big directory. 2. There is a subdir you don't want find to decend to. (entirely ignore) 3. You don't want find to decend to any mounted filesystems under this dir. * The -xdev flag tells find do not go to other filesystems. * -path ./junk_dir -prune is the pattern to ignore ./junk_dir entirely. * The rest is the typical search and print. To ignore multiple subdirs, you can just iterate the pattern, e.g. find . -path ./junk1 -prune -o -path ./junk2 -prune ... If you do want to include other filesystems, then remove -xdev flag. If you want to search files, then change -type d to -type f.

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" }

Display a list of RPMs installed on a particular date
Find out which RPMs were installed on a particular date. These would (naturally) include update RPMs. This example shows searching for "Thu 05 Mar" (with grep). Alternatively, pipe it to less so you can search inside less (with less's neat text highlighting of the search term): rpm -qa --queryformat '%{installtime} \"%{vendor}\" %{name}-%{version}-%{release} %{installtime:date}\n' | less # (this example) search term: Thu 05 Mar

grep for minus (-) sign
Use flag "--" to stop switch parsing

vi show line numbers
you don't have to spell out numbers, you can just use nu

Get the size of all the directories in current directory
OSX's BSD version of the du command uses the -d argument instead of --max-depth.

Second pass dvd rip... The set of commands was too long, so I had to separate them into two.
This set of commands will rip a dvd title using a 2 pass mencoder xvid encode. It will provide a great quality rip. It will rip as close to 700MB as possible. (note the bitrate of -700000) Enjoy!

Unlock your KDE4.3 session remotely
The unlock command for KDE 4.3 has changed from krunner_lock, this process doesn't exist anymore. So here's the update :-) If qdbus complains about not being able to find X, put a "DISPLAY=:0 " (:0 being your X server display) in front of the command.

Using awk to sum/count a column of numbers.
Takes a input file (count.txt) that looks like: 1 2 3 4 5 It will add/sum the first column of numbers.


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