Commands using tar (226)

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Update pandoc via cabal
An alternative to built-in package manager, keep pandoc in sync with upstream releases.

read unixtimestamp with festival
you will hear how many seconds since 1.1.1970 in english words with billions, millions and thousands. this is very useful, if you want to get over to use the unixtimestamp instead of the 24 hour clock in your dayly life

use the real 'rm', distribution brain-damage notwithstanding
The backslash avoids any 'rm' alias that might be present and runs the 'rm' command in $PATH instead. In a misguided attempt to be more "friendly", some Linux distributions (or sites/etc.) alias 'rm' to 'rm -i'. Unfortunately, this trains users to expect that files won't actually be deleted until they okay it. This expectation will fail with catastrophic results when they use other distributions, move to other sites, etc., and doesn't really even work 100% even with the alias. It's too late to fix 'rm', but '\rm' should work everywhere (under bash).

Print today's date in ISO format without calling an external command (bash 4)

test for ksh/bash
Dave Korn gave me this one. It works because ksh allows variable names ( w/o the $name syntax ) used by sh and bash. I wrote it to permit "single source" shell libraries; the current objective: every shell library may be sourced by either shell. see http://github.com/applemcg/backash

dd with progress bar and statistics to gzipped image
This is a useful command to backup an sd card with relative total size for piping to pv with a progressbar

find text in a file
this will find text in the directory you specify and give you line where it appears.

Do some learning...
Just realized how needless the 'ls' has been... This version is also multilingual, since there is no need to grep for a special key word ("nothing"/"nichts"/"rien"/"nada"...). And it makes use of all the available horizontal space.

Fire CMD every time FILE (or directory) is updated (on *BSD)

find an unused unprivileged TCP port
Not really better - just different ;) There's probably a really simple solution out there somewhere...


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