Commands using sort (800)

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Alert visually until any key is pressed
I learned a few things reading this command. But I did run into a few issues: 1. On systems that don't use GNU echo (e.g. macOS 10.14.5 Mojave), the e option may not be supported. In this case ANSI escape codes will echoed as text and the terminal will not flash, like this: \e[?5h\e[38;5;1m A L E R T Thu Jun 20 16:31:29 PDT 2019 2. Since the read command strips\ignores leading backslashes, if a user types the backslash character once in the loop, it will not break. Typing backslash twice in a loop will break as expected. 3. The foreground color is set to red (\e[38;5;1m) on every loop. This could be set once before we call while, and then reset once when the loop breaks. 4. Instead of resetting the foreground color when it breaks, the video mode is set back to normal (\e[?5l). This has the effect of leaving the terminal text red until it is manually reset. The alternative I'm proposing here addresses these issues. I tested it on macOS and Arch Linux.

Prefix every line with a timestamp
Useful to add a timestamp to every line printed to stdout. You can use `-Ins` instead of `-Iseconds` if you want more precision.

Show this month's calendar, with today's date highlighted
Explanation: * The date command evaluated to today's date with blank padded on the left if single digit * The grep command search and highlight today's date * The --before-context and --after-context flags displays up to 6 lines before and after the line containing today's date; thus completes the calendar. I have tested this command on Mac OS X Leopard and Xubuntu 8.10

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

View non-printing characters with cat
Useful to detect number of tabs in an empty line, DOS newline (carriage return + newline). A tool that can help you understand why your parsing is not working.

Provide the ten largest subfolders in the current folder

add a backup (or any other) suffix to a file
Very helpful when you've got complex filenames and needs to change just some small parts of it. Renaming a file called "i-made-a-small-typo-right-here" to "i-made-a-big-typo-right-here": $ mv -vi i-made-a-{small,big}-typo-right-here You could also copy multiple files, edit, remove, process, etc.

sorting file contents into individual files with awk
This command will sort the contents of FILENAME by redirecting the output to individual .txt files in which 3rd column will be used for sorting. If FILENAME contents are as follows: foo foo A foo bar bar B bar lorem ipsum A lorem Then two files called A.txt and B.txt will be created and their contents will be: A.txt foo foo A foo lorem ipsum A lorem and B.txt will be bar bar B bar

Validate all XML files in the current directory and below
If everything validates, there's no output. Can be handy to run on a cron job set up to email output.

Lets Tux say the random fact. [add it to .bashrc to see it in new terminal window]


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