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Create backup copy of file, adding suffix of the date of the file modification (NOT today's date)
When I go to change a configuration file I always like to make a backup first. You can use "cp -p" to preserve the modification time, but it gets confusing to have file.prev, file.prev2, etc. So I like to add a YYMMDD suffix that shows when the file was last changed. "stat -c %Y" gives you the modification time in epoch seconds, then "date -d @" converts that to whatever format you specify in your "+format" string.

send tweets to twitter (and get user details)
great for outputting tweets from cron jobs and batch scripts

List all duplicate directories
Very quick! Based only on the content sizes and the character counts of filenames. If both numbers are equal then two (or more) directories seem to be most likely identical. if in doubt apply: $ diff -rq path_to_dir1 path_to_dir2 AWK function taken from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2912224/find-duplicates-lines-based-on-some-delimited-fileds-on-line

Live stream a remote desktop over ssh using only ffmpeg
Play with the framerate option '-r' to scale back bandwidth usage. The '-s' option is the captured screan area, not the rescaled size. If you want to rescale add a second '-s' option after '-i :0'. Rescaling smaller will also decrease bandwidth.

no # comments, blank lines, white space. # can start in any column
The shortest and most complete comment/blank line remover... Any line where the first non-whitespace character is # (ie, indented # comments), and all null and blank lines are removed. Use the alias as a filter: $ noc /etc/hosts or $ grep server /etc/hosts | noc Change to nawk depending awk versions.

List all NPM global packages installed

Pretty Print a simple csv in the command line
Will handle pretty much all types of CSV Files. The ^M character is typed on the command line using Ctrl-V Ctrl-M and can be replaced with any character that does not appear inside the CSV. Tips for simpler CSV files: * If newlines are not placed within a csv cell then you can replace `map(repr, r)` with r

find all active IP addresses in a network
You send a unicast ICMP packet to each host. Many firewalls will drop that ICMP. However, in order to send the ICMP, you'll have first done an ARP request and the remote machine is unlikely to ignore that, so the computer will be in your ARP table.

grep certain file types recursively

Hiding and Show files on Mac OS X
These commands will mark a file as hidden or visible to Mac OS X Finder. Notice the capitol V vs the lowercase v. This will also work for directories. setfile -a V foo.bar; // This marks the file invisible setfile -a v foo.bar; // This marks the file visible I have also found that adding the following aliases are helpful: alias hide='setfile -a V' alias show='setfile -a v'


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