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Command to keep an SSH connection open
This runs the uptime command every 30 seconds to avoid an SSH connection dropping due to inactivity. Granted there are better ways of solving this problem but this is sometimes the right tool for the job.

Show current weather for any US city or zipcode
Scrape the National Weather Service

Display the list of all opened tabs from Firefox via a python one-liner and a shell hack to deal with python indentation.
You have to do that before : $ cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/ Require bash. If you use something else, you may use $ echo | python Forked from ArkSeth python script.

change up n directories
Change n directories up, without parameters change one up

mercurial close branch

Check if a command is available in your system
Usefull to detect if a commad that your script relies upon is properly installed in your box, you can use it as a function function is_program_installed() { type "$1" >/dev/null } Invoke it and check the execution code is_program_installed "dialog" if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "dialog is not installed" exit 1 fi

list files recursively by size

cd into another dir to run a one-liner, but implicitly drop back to your $OLD_PWD after
Obviously the example given is necessarily simple, but this command not only saves time on the command line (saves you using "cd -" or, worse, having to type a fully qualified path if your command cd's more than once), but is vital in scripts, where I've found the behaviour of "cd -" to be a little broken at times.

Get a list of the top 10 heaviest tables in your mysql database - useful for performance diagnostics

Speed up builds and scripts, remove duplicate entries in $PATH. Users scripts are oftern bad: PATH=/apath:$PATH type of thing cause diplicate.


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