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generate random password (works on Mac OS X)
Prepending env LC_CTYPE=C fixes a problem with bad bytes in /dev/urandom on Mac OS X

Easy and fast access to often executed commands that are very long and complex.
When using reverse-i-search you have to type some part of the command that you want to retrieve. However, if the command is very complex it might be difficult to recall the parts that will uniquely identify this command. Using the above trick it's possible to label your commands and access them easily by pressing ^R and typing the label (should be short and descriptive). UPDATE: One might suggest using aliases. But in that case it would be difficult to change some parts of the command (such as options, file/directory names, etc).

resolve short urls
since the most url shorteners respond with a header containing the Location: ... this works with most common shorteners

Get a metascore from metacritic.com
This will fetch a metascore from metacritic.com. It requires a url from metacritic without the http://www.metacritic.com/ Example: $ metascore games/platforms/wii/supermariogalaxy - $ metascore tv/shows/marriageref - $ metascore video/titles/newmoon Would be cool to use this in some sort of a graph.

remap Caps_Lock to Escape

create an incremental backup of a directory using hard links
dname is a directory named something like 20090803 for Aug 3, 2009. lastbackup is a soft link to the last backup made - say 20090802. $folder is the folder being backed up. Because this uses hard linking, files that already exist and haven't changed take up almost no space yet each date directory has a kind of "snapshot" of that day's files. Naturally, lastbackup needs to be updated after this operation. I must say that I can't take credit for this gem; I picked it up from somewhere on the net so long ago I don't remember where from anymore. Ah, well... Systems that are only somewhat slicker than this costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars - but we're HACKERS! We don't need no steenkin' commercial software... :)

Sort files in folders alphabetically
Creates one letter folders in the current directory and moves files with corresponding initial in the folder.

Use top to monitor only all processes with the same name fragment 'foo'
$ pgrep foo may return several pids for process foobar footy01 etc. like this: 11427 12576 12577 sed puts "-p " in front and we pass a list to top: $ top -p 11427 -p 12576 -p 12577

list block devices
Shows all block devices in a tree with descruptions of what they are.

a function to find the fastest DNS server
http://public-dns.info gives a list of online dns servers. you need to change the country in url (br in this url) with your country code. this command need some time to ping all IP in list.


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