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Remove grep itself from ps
When you 'ps|grep' for a given process, it turns out that grep itself appears as a valid line since it contains the RE/name you are looking for. To avoid grep from showing itself, simply insert some wildcard into process' name.

bash/ksh function: given a file, cd to the directory it lives
fcd : file change directory A bash function that takes a fully qualified file path and cd's into the directory where it lives. Useful on the commadline when you have a file name in a variable and you'd like to cd to the directory to RCS check it in or look at other files associated with it. Will run on any ksh, bash, likely sh, maybe zsh.

convert unixtime to human-readable

Advanced python tracing
Trace python statement execution and syscalls invoked during that simultaneously

Put uppercase letters in curly brackets in a BibTeX database
It is often recommended to enclose capital letters in a BibTeX file in braces, so the letters will not be transformed to lower case, when imported from LaTeX. This is an attempt to apply this rule to a BibTeX database file. DO NOT USE sed '...' input.bib > input.bib as it will empty the file! How it works: $ /^\s*[^@%]/ Apply the search-and-replace rule to lines that start (^) with zero or more white spaces (\s*), followed by any character ([...]) that is *NOT* a "@" or a "%" (^@%). $ s===g Search (s) for some stuff and replace by other stuff. Do that globally (g) for all matches in each processed line. $ \([A-Z][A-Z]*\)\([^}A-Z]\|},$\) Matches at least one uppercase letter ([A-Z][A-Z]*) followed by a character that is EITHER not "}" and not a capital letter ([^}A-Z]) OR (|) it actually IS a "}", which is followed by "," at the end of the line ($). Putting regular expressions in escaped parentheses (\( and \), respectively) allows to dereference the matched string later. $ {\1}\2 Replace the matched string by "{", followed by part 1 of the matched string (\1), followed by "}", followed by the second part of the matched string (\2). I tried this with GNU sed, only, version 4.2.1.

Put split files back together, without a for loop
After splitting a file, put them all back together a lot faster then doing $cat file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 > mainfile or $for i in {0..5}; do cat file$i > mainfile; done When splitting, be sure to do split -d for getting numbers instead of letters

Search commandlinefu from the command line
There's probably a more efficient way to do this rather than the relatively long perl program, but perl is my hammer, so text processing looks like a nail. This is of course a lot to type all at once. You can make it better by putting this somewhere: $ clf () { (curl -d "q=$@" http://www.commandlinefu.com/search/autocomplete 2>/dev/null) | egrep 'autocomplete|votes|destination' | perl -pi -e 's/$/\n\n/g;s/^ +|\([0-9]+ votes,//g;s/^\//http:\/\/commandlinefu.com\//g'; } Then, to look up any command, you can do this: $ clf diff This is similar to http://www.colivre.coop.br/Aurium/CLFUSearch except that it's just one line, so more in the spirit of CLF, in my opinion.

Find and copy scattered mp3 files into one directory
I used this command to recursively gather all mp3 files that were previously imported into their own directories (sorted by band name) in Songbird.

Use AbiWord to generate a clean HTML document from a Microsoft Word document.
Credit goes to @Porges from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/67964/what-is-the-best-free-way-to-clean-up-word-html.

shows the full path of shell commands


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