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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" }

Find your graphics chipset
Displays only the VGA adapter/chipset being used for the graphics. In this case, it gave me the "M22" and "Mobility Radeon x300" that I needed to research a graphics issue I was having.

Write comments to your history.
A null operation with the name 'comment', allowing comments to be written to HISTFILE. Prepending '#' to a command will *not* write the command to the history file, although it will be available for the current session, thus '#' is not useful for keeping track of comments past the current session.

Nicely display permissions in octal format with filename
Since the original command (#1873) didn't work on FreeBSD whose stat lacks the "-c" switch, I wrote an alternative that does. This command shows also the fourth digit of octal format permissions which yields the sticky bit information.

Add temporary entry to authorized_keys
If you frequently need to connect to your ubersecure mainframe from various uberunsafe machines, you have to face difficult decision: (a) type the password everytime during the session (lame), (b) add local public key to mainframes authorized_keys file (unsafe), (c) as above, but remove this key at the end of the session (pain in the a55). So let's say you save The Command to tempauth file in bin directory of your mainframe's account and make it executable. Then, while you're on one of these unsafe ones, do: $ cat $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub|ssh 5z474n@mainframe.nl bin/tempauth 30 and password prompts stop the harassment for 30 minutes and you don't have to care to remove the unsafe key after that.

vim as a pager - similar to less command but with color
use vim like less command pager but with color highlighting = pretty :p also u can use /usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh

diff will usually only take one file from STDIN. This is a method to take the result of two streams and compare with diff. The example I use to compare two iTunes libraries but it is generally applicable.
diff is designed to compare two files. You can also compare directories. In this form, bash uses 'process substitution' in place of a file as an input to diff. Each input to diff can be filtered as you choose. I use find and egrep to select the files to compare.

diff files while disregarding indentation and trailing white space

Print every Nth line
Sometimes commands give you too much feedback. Perhaps 1/100th might be enough. If so, every() is for you. $ my_verbose_command | every 100 will print every 100th line of output. Specifically, it will print lines 100, 200, 300, etc If you use a negative argument it will print the *first* of a block, $ my_verbose_command | every -100 It will print lines 1, 101, 201, 301, etc The function wraps up this useful sed snippet: $ ... | sed -n '0~100p' don't print anything by default $ sed -n starting at line 0, then every hundred lines ( ~100 ) print. $ '0~100p' There's also some bash magic to test if the number is negative: we want character 0, length 1, of variable N. $ ${N:0:1} If it *is* negative, strip off the first character ${N:1} is character 1 onwards (second actual character).

Install pip with Proxy
Installs pip packages defining a proxy


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