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Run a program transparently, but print a stack trace if it fails
For automated unit tests I wanted my program to run normally, but if it crashed, to add a stack trace to the output log. I came up with this command so I wouldn't have to mess around with core files. The one downside is that it does smoosh your program's stderr and stdout together.

To play a file at 1.5 times normal speed without increasing the pitch

List users with running processes
This is different that `who` in that who only cares about logged-in users running shells, this command will show all daemon users and what not; also users logged in remotely via SSH but are running SFTP/SCP only and not a shell.

Create a nifty overview of the hardware in your computer
After the command is done, open the html file in a browser

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" }

Set gnome wallpaper to a random jpg from the specified directory
Every time this is run it will change your background picture. For added fun Add some DBUS magic: . $HOME/.dbus/session-bus/`cat /var/lib/dbus/machine-id`-0 export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS and a crontab entry: */5 * * * * above_command_in_script.sh >/dev/null 2>/dev/null now wallpaper changes every 5 mins

backup directory. (for bash)

nohup that doesn't generate nohup.out
I'm sure this can be piped into another way. Please share!

mysql bin log events per minute
shows number of mysql bin log events (which are mysql server events) per minute, useful to check stress times postmortem

Make vim open in tabs by default (save to .profile)
I always add this to my .profile rc so I can do things like: "vim *.c" and the files are opened in tabs.


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